By Neelam Rahim

The country is set for another week of load shedding with few accurate answers on how the government plans to address the Eskom energy crisis. As the crisis deepens, trade union Solidarity announced that it intends to become involved in power generation through the development company Kanton, the main shareholder. It also called on small power producers to apply in their hundreds for generation permits.

Radio Islam discusses with Connie Mulder, head of the Solidarity Research Institute.

Connie said the best way to sum it up is it’s going bad.

“We’re now sitting with a 6000-megawatt shortfall in generation capacity, which is only going to get worse. Eskom’s average plant life is now 41 years, plants, generally over lifetime or 50 years, so we’re nearing the end.”

Connie also tells Radio Islam, “There is nothing planned from government surrounding this. This means it will only worsen if we rely on the government or Eskom to fix the power prices, which is why we’ve announced that we’re not going to do that; we will do it ourselves.”

Wanting to pursue this option of smaller power producers applying for generation permits and advising others to do the same, Connie says, “The thing that bothers us the most is, last year, June, a presidential proposal announced that you can now generate 100 megawatts for self without a licence with just registration. And you can even sell that power. But it’s not happening. For some reason, there are bottlenecks in the system blocking South Africans from successfully generating power and solving this crisis. And we’re now calling number one on small-scale generators because we needed large-scale, small-scale generation to get out of this crisis to apply literally in their hundreds of 1000s for these permits. There was no so we can do a floodgate of applications.”

Connie further mentions, “Unfortunately, no cheap solutions left for loadshedding. The best time to build a power station was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now.”

For more about this, listen to Radio Islam’s podcast below.