Cape Town - Industry leaders leaders gathered in Cape Town on Tuesday to participate in the Western Cape Government’s (WCG) Cabinet Meets Business engagement where they discussed the unfolding energy crisis and the efforts being made to make the province energy resilient during ongoing load shedding.
Premier Alan Winde emphasised the WCG and the City stood with Eskom in solving the energy crisis and believed that under Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter and his team, the power utility was doing everything it could to resolve the country’s energy challenges.
In facilitating this engagement, Finance and Economic Opportunities MEC Mireille Wenger said they hoped to harness the power of partnerships by bringing together local and provincial government, the private sector and Eskom to share their plans to address this issue.
This was needed as WCG green economy chief director Helen Davies outlined how energy security and reliability for the future continued to look severe.
Davies said the country has had more load shedding in the first six months of this year than the whole of last year and that the likely scenario indicated stage 1 or 2 load shedding would continue for the rest of the year with higher stages expected from next month onwards.
In a candid keynote address, De Ruyter explained the power utility’s existing generation capacity would be ramping down significantly in the next 10 to 15 years, requiring additional capacity.
Eskom’s existing fleet generation would be decreasing from 50GW to 15GW by 2050 and De Ruyter added that by 2030, at least 50 to 60GW of renewable capacity would need to be added.
De Ruyter said at least R1.2 trillion was required in electricity investment before 2035 to ensure the required capacity to mitigate the energy crisis.
He broke this down and explained an estimate of R990bn was required for generation capacity, while R130bn was required for transmission capacity and R56bn was required for distribution capacity to strengthen the network for embedded generation.
“There is always opportunity in crisis, and the call was put out today for businesses to invest in innovative energy generation solutions, and to look at innovation as a whole in this space – and to do so with haste.
“Energy generation has become an economic opportunity that businesses should look to embrace,” Winde said.
This call and the various bold energy plans were acknowledged at the engagement but the impression from the private sector was that it needed surety that there was alignment between Eskom, national, provincial and local government on these plans and methods.
The premier added it was the responsibility of not just those present to come up with solutions, but every single citizen should also do what they can to help, even if it meant contributing through the reduction of energy usage.