“How does Eskom intend to end loadshedding when it doesn’t even have an adequate budget for maintenance?

Short term "pain" followed by "long term gain"?

Originally written for IOL

The end of the rolling blackouts, which started in 2008, is expected to continue in the foreseeable future, with no doubt that the poorest South Africans will suffer the consequences of “load shedding” that includes high youth unemployment, an increase in the crime rate and children having to study by candlelight

Despite their rhetoric, we would be forgiven to think that the politicians who live in the uptown business communities, and whose power is never cut, don’t seem to care that the power utility is dying and that the ramifications of such a policy approach can spark revolution and threaten the survival of the state.

Eskom’s board has a higher budget allocated for diesel (R22 billion) than for maintaining the 16GW of power that is out of service (R10.5bn). The power utility is being forced into the type of policies that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would have recommended had South Africa be ran by a series of callous technocrats. Cut the budget, make sure that it doesn’t work, and then get people angry enough so that privatization (that is in practice rent-seeking with the state underwriting the oligarch’s risks) becomes the only attractive solution.

Do our leaders  care that 2.7 million people in the wider Mpumalanga region, of whom the majority are black and unionized, might soon have to flock to the larger metropoles as the coal communities collapse?

Eskom’s failure has turned modern South Africa into a neo-feudal country with bad policy decisions and corruption at the heart of it. If a visitor from the 1970s were to return today, he would have noted that the Apartheid government achieved their long-standing ambition of establishing a permanent serf class – not through racial legislation, but rather by coalescing the black managerial and white business elites into accepting stringent environmental laws as they neglect the maintenance of the coal fleet. A policy that induces fuel poverty in the name of ‘the climate’ and ‘the end of coal’ is as cruel as one that restricts them from owning property on colonial paternalistic grounds.

The anti-coal propaganda speaks to Noam Chomsky’s remarks that one should never underestimate the psychological burden of suppressing obvious truths while maintaining the required doctrines of benevolence.

Today, of Eskom’s roughly 50GW generation capacity, 16GW are out of permanent service and 6GW is said to be under maintenance. Under ideal conditions Eskom should have 5GW under current routine maintenance with no plant permanently out of service. Yet with 21GW being offline, there are almost as many units out of service as in service. South Africa’s coal fleet is therefore one of the few in the world that is more intermittent than renewable energy.

Yet we are being offered all kind of solution that ranges from the marginal to nonsensical such as privatization, increasing renewables (with Eskom’s former executive Jan Oberholzer landing a new job in a renewable energy firm), LNG Imports, transmission lines being built out to the Northern Cape Province and an increase of “transformation” targets. Government has even appointed a team of expert German and Chinese consultants to help us figure out what is wrong with Eskom. As if we don’t have local engineers available and as if Eskom doesn’t know that the coal fleet isn’t being maintained?

Although some of the above solutions might theoretically end loadshedding, none of them speaks to the elephant in the room i.e., that Eskom has no adequate budget allocated for maintenance and therefore is actively being prevented by its board from solving loadshedding.

The policy of The South African Treasury, Minister of Electricity, Minister of Minerals and Energy and Eskom’s board (whoever is making the decision) should be straightforward.

·        Scrap the ridiculous environmental regulations.

·        Put any policy that doesn’t speak to ending load shedding aside (such as breaking up Eskom)

·        Audit the broken power stations.

·        Improve the quality of the coal being burned.

·        Approve a maintenance budget.

·        Focus on fixing and repairing 16GW of units that are currently out of service.

·        Upgrade the older stations, if necessary, to High Efficiency Low Emissions (HELE) Coal.

·        Listen to the South African Engineers and not the activists and conflicted think tanks.

·        Simultaneously expand private generation with developers, and not the taxpayer, paying for the integration costs.

When someone is brought into a hospital and he is constantly bleeding, the doctor doesn’t see if he needs to take out his appendix, he rather stops the bleeding!

Eskom should fix the coal or South Africa will face a potential bloody revolution.