POLL | What plans do you have in place to avoid a dark Christmas?

Outgoing CEO Andre de Ruyter admitted the power utility has seen its fair share of troubles but said it has a plan to keep the lights on over the next few months.

“We are planning carefully to do everything in our power to ensure there is no load-shedding during elections. We understand this is an important democratic process and we wish to enable and facilitate that.

“Fortunately, demand over the Christmas period is traditionally low, so we do not anticipate there will be load-shedding over the Christmas period.”

To bring an end to load-shedding, energy minister Gwede Mantashe said Eskom has to solve its generation capacity problem.

The power utility is running at very low energy availability factors (EAFs), a measure of electricity output compared with installed capacity. 

At best, Eskom is achieving output of 26,000MW, or an EAF of about 60%.

According to Mantashe, the lack of stable and sufficient power supply is the main reason for poor economic growth. 

In the mining sector load-shedding posed the biggest challenge to growth, followed by disruptions to Transnet rail services and high levels of crime.

“In [the third quarter] our GDP grew 1.6%. This could have been 3%, but because of load-shedding the economy can’t move,” Mantashe said

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