The Minerals Council South Africa, the apex body representing the country’s mining industry, made an impassioned plea to the government to address the country’s crippling power problems, pvmagazine reported.
“At the forefront of the constraints on the economy, and on the mining industry, is the insecurity of power supply and its continuing rapidly escalating cost…Eskom is in a significant crisis and cannot guarantee reliable electricity supply to meet the country’s needs…Eskom has been indicating that it needs two years of permanent ‘stage-2’ load-shedding to give it the space to fix certain power stations (including Medupi) back to a better reliability level…This will be disastrous for the economy.”
The Council suggested the SA government rope in power generation from the private sector by feeding it into the grid. It also recommended that Eskom should purchase power from any idle capacity in existing wind and solar plants.
Further, the Council demanded that the government dismantle all red tape standing in the way of additional power generation that could be brought online to address the energy deficit.
According to Bloomberg, South African mining companies plan to build 609 MW of mainly solar PV power capacity for captive use. These include two 200 MW solar PV projects, each proposed by Sibanye Gold and Vedanta.
Read the pvmagazine article HERE.
Image Source (Image not modified in any way): Paul Keller (Flickr)