CAPE TOWN - The City has announced it will publish documents in the next two weeks detailing their upcoming procurement of power from Independent Power Producers (IPPs).
This will include the announcement of tenders for the purchase of electricity from IPPs and timelines for bringing IPP-generated electricity onto the City’s supply network.
This comes after Eskom announced that stage 2 load shedding would be in effect until 5am on Monday after breakdowns at two more generating units.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said: “It has become clear to the City that if we wish to halt the damage caused by Eskom’s monopoly over electricity generation, we have to take matters into our own hands. The only way for us to provide reliable and affordable electricity to our residents is to source it from elsewhere.
“Bringing IPPs onto the grid, through the tendering process is a crucial step in ending load shedding over time. The economic effects of a reliable power supply in Cape Town will mean more profitable businesses and more job opportunities. Every Capetonian will benefit.
“We hope that other spheres of government will respect our Constitutional mandate to deliver electricity to our residents, and not stand in our way of making Cape Town the first loadshedding-free municipality in South Africa,” said Lewis.
During a media briefing on Wednesday, Eskom’s head of generation, Phillip Dukashe, said after that experiencing a number of breakdowns over the weekend following last week’s announcement that the system was solid, they “were not ready going into the outage and may (have) overestimated the ability to recover” before having to rely on emergency reserves.
Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter, said: “The shortage of generation capacity is exacerbated by two issues. “The first is the loss of 720 megawatts of generation capacity following the explosion of hydrogen at Medupi 4. That plant is currently in repair and we anticipate that it will take until the end of next year to fully complete that plant.
“Secondly, we have taken out unit 2 at Koeberg Plant on planned outage to do two things – the first is to refuel, the second is the replacement of the unit’s three steam generators.”
Chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer added that at this stage it was unclear until when load shedding would continue, as they work to recover broken down units, but the “risk remains that it could last until the end of March”.
In a statement, Eskom said since the weekend, the parastatal has utilised significant amounts of emergency generating reserves, which have now been depleted and need to be replenished.
Eskom will use this period of load shedding to replenish the emergency generation reserves. A unit each at Kusile and Kendal power stations tripped.
“Delays in returning units at Kusile, Tutuka, Duvha, Lethabo and Grootvlei have also contributed to the current supply constraints. Total breakdowns amount to 14 994MW while planned maintenance is 4 435MW of capacity as we continue with the reliability maintenance,” Eskom said.
Three generating units were expected to return to service by Wednesday afternoon.
Cape Times