Electricity Minister Kgocincho Ramukjuba, who warned last month that the winter would be “very harsh,” seemed more optimistic on Saturday, announcing that the average electricity generation had risen from 48 percent a few weeks ago to 60 percent.
“We are confident in our ability to overcome the winter,” he told reporters during a meeting of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress held in a hotel in eastern Johannesburg.
The minister added, “We will not witness the worst scenario that we expected, and we will continue to see improvement.”
The continent’s largest industrial power is suffering from a severe electricity crisis that has worsened since last year.
Months ago, the country’s 60 million people did not happen to live a day without a power outage.
The public electricity company “Eskom” produces most of the country’s electricity needs.
But the company, which is struggling with the aging of rickety coal-fired power stations, which are saddled with debts after years of corruption during the tenure of President Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), is no longer able to meet demand and imposes programmed power outages that sometimes reach record periods.
In the past weeks, the rationing period has decreased from 12 hours per day to about two hours.
“We have succeeded in maintaining these levels of efficiency,” the minister said.
He attributed this improvement to Eskom mobilizing the best experts and distributing them to the worst-performing power plants, whose “production now exceeds our expectations.”
He pointed out that the demand at the height of winter decreased from what was expected from 34,000 megawatts to 30,000.
Electricity rationing in South Africa has forced many citizens, who are accustomed to this outage, to search for other sources of energy, such as installing solar panels in their homes.
The minister added, “I am confident that we will overcome the interruption soon, and we will start work on creating an additional reserve margin in order to allow the economy to grow at the required level.”
This issue is crucial with less than a year to go to the general elections, as a result of which it is feared that the African National Congress party will lose, for the first time in its history, the majority.
In May, the central bank predicted that GDP would grow by only 0.3 percent this year and that power outages alone would cut growth in the country by at least two percentage points.
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