POWER GRID
SOUTH AFRICA NEEDS TO FACE GRID REALITIES TO OVERCOME THE POWER CRISIS For the last 20 years, the increasingly polarised arguments about South Africa’s electricity mix have obsessed with generation technologies – with the assumption that transmission and distribution were such a small part of the overall capital expenditure, that it was not important.
Mike Levington
CEO at HYD•RE•GEN Energy
Levington is the founder of Nexuses (Pty) Ltd., a strategic advisory practice that focuses on the adoption of the green economy in South Africa’s just energy transition. He is a member of the Green Hydrogen Panel and the Project Committee of the South African Renewable Energy Masterplan.
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overnment, business and labour have consistently been self-serving in their approach to managing the electricity supply industry which has prioritised their vested interests over that of the general public.
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The electricity crisis has changed all of that. Electricity, no matter how it is generated, is of no use unless it can be delivered cost-effectively to a commercial enterprise that can convert it into economic value or to a residential customer to access a better life. We’re facing a situation where Eskom’s coal fleet is organically decommissioning itself, the energy policy-making framework has become fractured along ideological lines and, whilst legislation has been in place for over two years, SA Inc has woken up to the reality that self-generation is not the free lunch that Eskom has provided them for the last 90 years. Most importantly, all of South Africa’s key stakeholders have finally woken up to the global new reality that any realistic net zero ambitions over any time horizon will rely as much on the grid as it
Advancing Auditing &Accountability
will on the mass adoption of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind.
The architecture of South Africa’s electricity sector as we know it today was set by close interactions between Eskom and South Africa’s mining sector in the 1950s. And it is here that the history of our electricity supply industry (ESI) determines the extent of the challenge facing the country’s energy transition from both an economic and just transition perspective. From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a dramatic scaling up of the size of power stations to exploit the country’s huge coal resources located in Mpumalanga and deliver power to the gold and platinum fields located to the north and west of Johannesburg. The scale of these capital projects dwarfed the economics of any transmission infrastructure required and thus the pattern was set that the needs of industrial-scale electricity customers would always
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