Cape Town – Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan has said that Eskom’s recent implementation of high stages of load shedding is set to decline by this weekend.
Gordhan was speaking during an interview with the international television network, Bloomberg on Thursday.
“What we expect is the kind of crisis we have experienced over the last 10 days where we’ve had loadshedding of a significant order will decline by this weekend,” said Gordhan.
However, South Africans will still fall prey to load shedding in the time to come.
“We will have load shedding for a while in South Africa, perhaps at level 2,” he said.
Speaking about the immediate and medium-long term plans to solve the current energy crisis, Gordhan said the new investments in renewable energy were beginning to kick in.
“Our plan is firstly to ensure that the current electricity utility, Eskom, continues to improve its performance,” he said.
“A lot of effort is going into that and hopefully sooner rather than later it pays dividends,” added Gordhon.
Gordhan said it was hoped that the process of getting private investments into generation capacity could accelerate.
“We have a mechanism called bid windows in South Africa, and thousands of megawatts of renewables in the form of wind and solar have been committed to already by private sector investment, so that will accelerate as we go into next year.
“That will provide quite a relief in terms of available megawatts to our system,” Gordhan said.
In the immediate instance, he said that the country was trying to procure short-term energy that could assist in solving the current crisis.
He also said there was no risk of the grid collapsing as there were a great set of experts operating within Eskom and managing the grid. He said that load shedding was in place to prevent the grid from collapsing, reiterating that it will not get to that point.
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Compiled by Junaid Benjamin
