The government remained mum on Eskom’s negotiations with the National Treasury aimed at assisting the struggling power utility with money to buy diesel, in a bid to keep the lights on amid escalating levels of power cuts.
The Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) yesterday did not want to be drawn into the matter, and referred all queries about Eskom’s request for additional funding to the Treasury.
Treasury, however, also referred to its statement issued last week where it said the staggered nature of the budget process made it difficult to consider and accommodate any ad hoc funding requests outside of this process.
In a statement, Treasury said it would continue with the engagements with the DPE and Eskom aimed at identifying solutions to this matter, as it was acutely aware of the impact that diesel shortages might have on already severe levels of load shedding.
It said Eskom did not apply for funding through the budget process and Eskom management should therefore take all necessary steps to ensure that they secure the diesel needed to avert severe load shedding.
The Bureau for Economic Research researchers at Stellenbosch University yesterday said Treasury should do everything in its power to find the requested money to save the economy from collapse.
“While we have some sympathy for National Treasury’s argument that it does not have these funds as it was not applied for during the budgetary process, it is not difficult to argue that the situation has changed materially since then,” the bureau said.
“Furthermore, not supplying the funding comes at an enormous cost to the economy, much more than the roughly R19 billion Eskom is asking for. To be sure, load shedding would not be solved with more money for diesel, but the higher, more damaging stages could possibly be avoided,” it said.
While the third quarter economic growth remained fairly resilient at 1.6%, economists have indicated that the real impact of intense load shedding would only be realised in the coming months as the “reopening” boost to the economy and other normalisation effects, fade.
Load shedding was ramped up to Stage 6 on Thursday, following a high number of breakdowns and the need to preserve emergency generation units, but Stage 5 is set to continue into this week.
The struggling power utility last month said it had blown its budget and spent in excess of R12 billion this year already, burning diesel.
Eskom has also reiterated that load shedding will be very challenging over the next six to 12 months, as the 920MW Unit 1 at Koeberg Nuclear power station is offline for the next six months.
Meanwhile, the City of Joburg – South Africa’s financial capital – has made an urgent call to Eskom to be exempted from the ongoing load shedding for three days, in a bid to respond to escalating faults and outages after the torrential rain in Gauteng.
As of Monday morning, City Power was still dealing with over 4 000 service calls related to the outages, with a significant proportion now being multi-day issues.
Areas hardest hit include the larger Roodepoort, Hursthill, Northcliff and Lenasia where infrastructure was severely damaged by flooding.
Joburg’s MMC for environment and infrastructure services Michael Sun said City Power has expressed its concern that load shedding was not only causing additional faults and stress on the network, but also preventing the entity from being able to effectively attend to the outages and stabilise the developing crisis.
“It is a simple fact that power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power, and cable theft increases exponentially during blackouts,” Sun said.
“Accordingly, executive mayor Dr Mpho Phalatse has on behalf of City Power submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from load shedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog.”
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