Eskom: South Africa fixes what is broken

And rolling blackouts are reduced

Yesterday, December 16 2023, Eskom successfully reduced the Unplanned Capacity Loss Factor (UCLF) below 11GW. If these levels can be sustained, South Africa will have significant excess capacity, thus providing the means to alleviate the necessity for any future load shedding.

As I have previously emphasized, there is no imperative to privatize Eskom or undertake extensive market reforms. The involvement of the President's brother-in-law as an "independent power provider" and the introduction of new nuclear power, while potentially beneficial, are not immediate necessities.

The primary solution for South Africa lies in a straightforward approach: let’s stop pointing fingers and address the long-standing issues with neglected power plants and ensure that the utility is staffed with competent individuals.

Despite reducing the UCLF, it remains disconcerting that there is a notable variance in Eskom’s data, suggesting challenges in operation and achieving system stability. Resolving this issue should be a priority to ensure a more consistent and reliable power supply for the future.

Addressing the broken coal fleet's issues should be our primary focus. Our politicians should cease apologizing for our reliance on coal, and stop making ungrounded excuses such as “the plants are too old” and that they “cannot be fixed”. It’s only after resolving these concerns that we can we shift our attention to other climate-related priorities.

As the energy author Robert Bryce mentioned to me a few months ago, South Africa is a developing country, considered poor by global standards yet highly affluent compared to other African nations. Our unique situation stems from being surrounded by neighbors experiencing fuel poverty, a circumstance exacerbated by our own lack of domestic supply.

We cannot merely switch off their lights to address our own load shedding, and we cannot afford to harm ourselves by hastily abandoning the broken coal fleet to appease environmental concerns. In impoverished countries, the immediate focus must be on ensuring a security of supply. Basic necessities, such as food for the population, must take precedence before we prioritize environmental concerns or engage in rent-seeking practices in our electricity supply through "the free market."

Moreover, being a water-scarce nation and lacking a "natural battery" like countries with extensive hydropower, South Africa must acknowledge that coal is poised to remain our inflexible baseload technology in the foreseeable future.

Our policies and decisions should align with the natural constraints that we face.

In addition to exploring Nuclear Power, South Africa should prioritize upgrading the existing coal fleet to HELE coal so that we can extract another 20 years of operation. This policy shift doesn't necessitate compromising on renewables or other technologies, as the objective is not to introduce more coal power stations, but rather to maximize the utility of the existing ones for as long as economically feasible.

As the most coal dependent country in the world, Eskom simply has no choice but to fix the coal fleet and it’s time that our politicians openly say in public what many engineers whisper to each other in private.

That moving away from coal for the foreseeable future, is simply impossible and that South Africa will probably be the last country in the world to do so.