Another hurdle to load shedding for South Africa

According to the head of an agency that procures power from private producers, a scarcity of energy grid connections is a key barrier that must be solved as South Africa looks to expand the production capacity required to stop record outages.

Since 2008, the continent’s most industrialised country has seen cyclical blackouts due to national utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd.’s failure to fulfil demand from an unstable fleet of coal-fired units prone to breakdowns.

While South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced a number of measures to address the crisis in the last year, including doubling wind power purchases from private contractors to 3,200 megawatts in a recent round of bids, none of those projects were chosen because they could not be connected.

Addressing a 6,000-megawatt capacity gap required to stabilise the system requires grid access for more new projects and faster approval processes, according to Bernard Magoro, head of the Independent Power Producers’ office, at a Cape Town conference.

Magoro stated that the office has been working with Eskom to overcome bottlenecks and would only launch another round of bids to acquire extra electricity from private suppliers when grid difficulties are resolved.

Moreover, a scheme to buy 3,000 megawatts of gas-fired electricity is encountering challenges in the ports that would receive the fuel and house the generation units, he added without elaborating.

Bids for 513 megawatts of storage capacity will be filed in July, and another government procurement procedure for batteries is scheduled to begin in the coming months, according to Magoro.