Eskom will spark a Cyril vs Gwede showdown

Either Eskom is shooting the lights out or it’s lying to us. More than a month now without loadshedding and the utility’s latest reported energy availability factor its EAF, the percentage of available generating capacity actually generating for the week ended May 5 (week 18 to Eskom) was 62.05%.

That’s a very good number and it wasn’t a flash in the pan either, but the end of a slow weekly march to a target it had originally promised to hit a year ago. That’s OK, and until proven otherwise the decent thing is to congratulate Eskom for finally doing its day job again.

There was, it must be said, an unusually sharp jump from week 17’s EAF of 58.6% and a sharp fall in “unplanned outages” (breakdowns) from 30.5% to 25.5%, but both all the week 18 numbers are on trend. If Eskom is found to have been secretly burning expensive diesel to keep the lights on ahead of the elections it will have been taking an incalculable financial and reputational risk.

Obviously private solar and a weak economy have significantly eased demand pressure on Eskom, but what is really interesting about the utility’s numbers is not the consequences of them being falsified but of them being accurate. Because if we are able to keep the lights on with just more than 60% of the available Eskom fleet functioning then the case for an alternative fuel bridging coal and renewable energy sources no longer exists, or at least shrinks to a tiny amount.

Many people will be put out by Eskom’s success. Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe leads a vociferous charge baying for the introduction into South Africa of liquefied natural gas (LNG). This lobby would convert Eskom power plants and even cars to run on the stuff, creating in the process a huge and eye-wateringly expensive new energy infrastructure to land the gas, transport it and use it. Everyone would be rich and Mantashe would sit atop a new statecontrolled monolith run through PetroSA, trading

LNG upstream and retailing it downstream.

We would import it and drill onshore and off for our “own”.

As President Cyril

Ramaphosa has currently designed things, Mantashe can’t touch Eskom, so in a way you have to take sides here. Cyril or Gwede it’s the coming big test of political power after the elections.

The last ANC national conference, in 2022, resolved “to return” SOEs like Eskom back to their departments, implying the department of public enterprises would close. This has not happened and the coming struggle for control of energy policy will be something to behold.

Ramaphosa’s term thus far has exposed his many frailties as a leader, but there is much worse waiting in the ANC wings if he were to go and if, as seems likely, the sensible opposition cannot make much progress in this election. Business has been making its anxieties clear by broadcasting these past few weeks how well its co-operative platforms on energy, logistics and crime with the Ramaphosa presidency are going.

But it may not be enough if Ramaphosa’s ANC cannot easily get back into government. Anything below 45% on May 29 and he is in trouble inside his party.

On the other hand, the prize for succeeding is that our tentative shift to renewable energy at least is not discarded. For all his talk, Mantashe has brought only 150MW of renewable energy into operation. It was a relief to see Bloomberg this week quoting a Presidency official saying we would soon present plans to get coal-fired plant closures back on track as we chase $2.5bn (about R45bn) of the $9.3bn Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) money we negotiated back in November 2022.

Since then there’s been a great deal of backsliding, with Mantashe trying to lead energy policy away from renewables. But unless we get this right we will forfeit the JETP funding and lose a generation of new consumers who will soon simply not buy products created with dirty fuels like coal and gas.

In California, the world’s fifth-largest economy (it’s bigger than France), Stanford University’s atmosphere and energy programme director, Prof Mark Jacobson, reports that for 54 of the past 62 days, and for the past 25 days straight, the state has run 100% on renewable power.

We are so far behind in this game, so hamstrung by politics that insist a “just” transition away from coal has to take account of dying coal jobs now, that we risk never seeing the jobs and prosperity a green economy could deliver to our children in the future. By the time we are ready the world’s markets will have moved on.

For all his talk, Mantashe has brought only 150MW of renewable energy into operation