How to save our power: sell it to the neighbours

● While Eskom struggles to keep the lights on at home and honours long-standing agreements to export electricity to SA’s neighbours, experts suggest the cross-border sale of power could save the parastatal.

Eskom sells electricity to Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia — most of it with favourable profit margins of between a 50c and R1 per kilowatt hour according to Eskom’s 2017/2018 annual report.

Mozambique is SA’s largest customer with 8,326GWh exported in the past financial year. The report said 2,250GWh were exported to Zimbabwe in the same period, followed by 2,127GWh to Namibia.

These exports take much-needed power from SA’s grid, but experts say that the sales could be a money-spinner for the cashstrapped state-owned utility.

Energy specialist Victoria Barr said an interconnected grid spanning these countries and the cross-border trade of electricity would help build a resilient electricity grid.

“If one state doesn’t have enough and another has a surplus, this can be traded through the existing infrastructure already in place and this is good for the system on the whole,” she said.

Eskom’s installed generation capacity would exceed local demand if a lack of maintenance had not crippled the system, Barr said. “Had there been better interconnection we could import power as needed and then, if we improve on our own capacity issues, we could then export it for a profit.

“In Europe, power is traded between countries on an ongoing basis. You need to spread the costs of running those power plants and get more revenue, and a way to do that is by exporting. Eskom is hamstrung by the temporary maintenance issues.”

Ted Blom, of the Energy Expert Coalition, said imported electricity, specifically from Mozambique’s Cahora Bassa hydroelectric project, was sold at favourable margins.

“We import erratic supply from Cahora Bassa at around 2c/kWh and we sell this to smelters at around 35c/kWh,” he said.

He said if Eskom could move to an even keel, the export of electricity would be an obvious and lucrative choice.

“We have 46GW capacity and only 30GW demand, so surplus should be exported. The issue at hand is a lack of maintenance, hence the missing gigawatts,” Blom said.