Minister of Electricity in the Presidency, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa remains upbeat about scaling back load shedding. Picture: Ayanda Ndamane / Independent Newspapers
Minister of Electricity in the Presidency, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Monday that Eskom power stations have been able to reduce load shedding by around 600 hours during the December and January 2023/24 period when compared to the previous year.
Ramokgopa made these comments during a media briefing aimed at updating South Africans on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan.
“Over the period of January 2023 to January 2024, we have been able to get back 3,510MW as a result of interventions. These interventions are not complete. There’s still additional work that we must do at Tutuka (power station). There's additional work that continues to be done at Kendal, Matla and the other power stations,” Ramokgopa said.
“If you were to take December of 2022 to February of 2023 and then you take the period of December 2023 to February 2024 …the period of the year that was, we have experienced load shedding of about 1,800 hours.
“When you see the period a year later … we have had about 1,200 hours of load shedding. Essentially, we have been able to reduce the hours of load shedding by about 600 hours. We are going in the right direction,” he noted.
Ramokgopa said that despite all these improvements, load shedding in any form remains unacceptable. He said that he wants to one day tell the public that “we have not experienced any hours of load shedding”.
According to Outlier, South Africa as experienced around 1,159 hours of load shedding in 2024 and 6,947 hours of load shedding in 2023.
Ramokgopa will in the next fortnight unveil a plan on the mechanism of funding the expansion of the transmission grid, which could unlock more than 2,300MW of energy in the short-term.
This comes as South Africa needs to expand its electricity transmission lines by more than 14,000km over the next few years to accommodate the additional generation capacity from renewables not connected to the grid in the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Western Cape.
The government is also ramping up investments in renewable energy with opening new Bid Windows, and has now increased the limit for renewable energy projects that can qualify for the carbon offsets regime from 15MW to 30MW.
Ramokgopa said he would outline the plan for the work they had done so far on the grid expansion and accessing funding for the project, especially by the private sector.
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