With the further decommissioning of Eskom’s fleet of power stations on hold, the utility needs to start developing its own fleet of renewable energy generation sources, Eskom CEO Dan Marokane said yesterday.
Speaking during a panel discussion at Standard Bank’s Unlocking Africa Conference in Cape Town yesterday, he said that having to deal with load shedding had forced Eskom to look inwards at restoring its operations, while “everybody else was taking advantage in the market while we weren’t looking”.
Marokane said the utility was overcoming its operational issues. It had land adjacent to its power stations available for the development of renewable energy, it was open to partnerships, and it has direct access to the grid system.
He said that while South Africa needed its coal-fired power stations to maintain base load electricity capacity to meet South Africa’s industrial electricity demand requirements, there was space in the market for the renewable-energy sector.
Marokane said the closure of the Komati power station over the past 18 months was not successful, because the planning for the re-purposing the site was not done properly in the beginning of the process, and the results showed that there was the potential to create a “social atomic bomb” when closing coal power stations.
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