By Thys Khiba – President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to chair a cabinet meeting to discuss and prioritise the issue of load shedding and country’s crippling power crisis on Wednesday.
Ramaphosa and his cabinet will meet to discuss amongst other issues the formulated short-term plans to assist citizens with and reduce power cuts.
South Africa continues to experience scheduled outages as power utility Eskom continues to encounter breakdowns at its stations.
The country’s President arrived on Tuesday and is expected to have meetings with ministers and members of the newly established National Energy Crisis Committee to deal with the rolling blackouts in South Africa.
Presidency spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told media that Ramaphosa had already held a virtual emergency meeting on Sunday with various ministers to talk about solutions for the ongoing energy crisis.
“For now, the President is going to be convening meetings with concerned Public Enterprises Minister [Pravin Gordhan], Mineral Resources and Energy Minster [Gwede Mantashe], Finance Minister [Enoch Godongwana], Environment, Forest and Fisheries [Barbara Baleni] who chairs the Energy crisis committee. So he held one emergency meeting with them on Sunday, he’s waiting for more updates and will certainly convene more meetings upon his return,” said Magwenya.
The recently established National Energy Crisis Committee members formed part of the meeting. While establishing this committee in July, Ramaphosa promised citizens that the government would be implementing short and long term plans to end load shedding.
The President confirmed the short term plans will include adding new generation capacity to the grid as quickly as possible.
Ramaphosa’s interventions announced in July include:
1. Boost the recruitment of skilled workers at Eskom and address sabotage and theft at the utility;
2. Improve logistics to ensure that diesel-fired turbines are supplied in a timely fashion;
3. Allow Eskom to buy excess power from private producers;
4. Import more power from countries in the region;
5. Implement a programme to incentivise the efficient use of power to cut demand by 600 megawatts;
6. Easing local content requirements so that renewable-power projects awarded in the so-called Bid Window 5 can go ahead;
7. Boosting the size of the sixth bid window and expediting further rounds;
8. Announce a plan to deal with Eskom’s debt before October.
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