The Democratic Alliance (DA) intends to facilitate the generation of nearly 6 gigawatts of power capacity to address nationwide electricity shortages and boost the national economy.
As reported by Daily Maverick, the Western Cape aims to generate up to 750 megawatts of supply by 2025 and reach 5,700 MW by 2035. This plan was outlined by the Premier of the Western Cape, Alan Winde, in an interview at Bloomberg’s Cape Town office on Wednesday.
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Since 2008, Eskom, which generates more than 90% of the country’s electricity, has been forced to implement daily rotational blackouts, with outages now at record levels. The ruling ANC has declared a state of disaster and announced emergency measures to help address the crisis, but it doesn’t appear to be improving any time soon.
Winde met with Eskom’s former CEO, André de Ruyter, shortly after his resignation in December to seek advice on how the province should handle energy provision.
With a budget that will be unveiled in mid-March, Winde plans to help municipalities increase their supply of electricity. He has assembled a team to speed up larger generational projects. In order to help shape the plans, the World Bank is providing Karen Breytenbach, a former director of the independent power producer office in South Africa.
The insufficient transmission grid is one of the system’s main problems in South Africa. The national government recently awarded contracts to private producers to supply additional electricity, but due to a lack of connections, not a single wind project was chosen for the contracts.
According to Winde, the Western Cape government has yet to decide which transmission options—Eskom infrastructure, municipal grids, and microgrids—will work best and in what combination. The province’s plans must account for its growing population, which is expected to reach eight million in the next six years, up from 7.2 million now.
Read more on Daily Maverick.
Premier Alan Winde hosted the first of a series of energy digicons this week. The purpose of the series is to keep the public informed about what the Western Cape Government (WGC) is doing to address chronic rolling blackouts in the short, medium, and long term.
The Premier explained, “It is important for us as a government to keep citizens, both in the Western Cape and beyond, informed on what we are doing to safeguard services and livelihoods from the damage caused by mass power cuts.”
Last month, in his “State of the Province” speech, Premier Winde promised to hold regular public events to show that the WCG is serious about being open about its efforts to end blackouts.
“Transparency and regular communication in a crisis of this magnitude are essential to help people make decisions for themselves and their loved ones, but also to keep us as a government accountable,” said Premier Winde.
“Power generation is not a provincial government mandate. This, however, does not mean we must simply do nothing and wait for the national government, which has displayed no urgency to act,” said Winde.
The Premier continued, “By holding digicons, similar to what we did during the COVID-19 pandemic, we can to a degree allay people’s anxiety by offering them critical information that helps them plan better during this crisis.”
“Going forward, the digicons are an opportunity for the media and general public to constructively engage with me and my team on issues related to the energy crisis and efforts by the provincial government to ameliorate the impact of the blackouts, and how the WCG is embracing and enabling the likes of renewable energy role players to form part of our energy resilience push,” Premier Winde added.
The premier encourages the public to join the broadcast across its various platforms every week.
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