Kusile Planning started under Alec Erwin

board for much of his 32-year career before retiring in 1999.

In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, Eskom (or Escom as it was known until 1987) lowered its prices and demand for electricity shot up as thousands of users — domestic and industrial alike — began to migrate to the cheaper form of energy. This forced a rush to build three power stations — Arnot, Kriel and Matla — which inevitably forced a sharp hike in electricity prices to part-fund the rapid expansion plans.

What Eskom did not quite appreciate, however, was its relatively unskilled workforce for the kind of plants it had brought on stream, some of which were poorly designed. By 1981, the utility was forced to embark on large-scale load-shedding as it tended to its operational disasters, says Messerschmidt. This forced the strategists back to the drawing board. Eskom went on an enormous spending spree and commissioned five new stations to help meet demand.

But the economic consequences of the international sanctions imposed on the apartheid state became manifest only in the mid1980s, says Brian Statham, who headed the planning