Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has assured citizens that the government was working on immediate “low hanging fruit” fixes to solve the energy crisis, while planning to attract R100 billion in funding to expand generation and transmission capacity by 2025.
Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa. File photo by Leon Sadiki/Bloomberg via Getty Images
He said the priority additional transformer programme will see 25 new projects supplying 13 gigawatts by 2030, and the expedited projects programme had identified 22 projects to produce a further 24 gigawatts by 2033. The latter projects are located in the Eastern Cape , KwaZulu-Natal , North West , Northern Cape and the Western Cape .
He said it was therefore important that the government’s energy commitments “get supported by an infrastructure layout that is biased towards those renewables”.“There are things I have identified as the low hanging fruit. There are several projects in execution that can give us generation connections immediately . There are three projects we are doing now and they will deliver, according to our computations, 2 335 megawatts [of new grid capacity], ” he said.
“The trend over the period as a result of constraints in the Eskom balance sheet before there was fiscal support, you will see every time the Eskom team from transmission led by Scheepers would say ‘we need this amount of resources’ and then because of the constraints they would get something lower than that. A delta has been accumulating over some period of time. We are behind from where we want to be from a planning point of view as a result of limited financing,” he said.
He said that funding was a major issue, alongside capacity. But the minister said this could be resolved if there was certainty in the market and the belief that the country could deliver. It is important the market knows where the funding comes from, he said.
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