Pretoria - Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink yesterday announced a bold energy plan for the metro to procure at least 1 000 megawatts of electricity independent of struggling Eskom in the next three years.
The move in the pipeline is intended to mitigate the negative impact of load shedding on the municipality.
Brink outlined the plan at Rooiwal Power Station, where he addressed the media following council’s resolution last week to subject the proposed alternative energy generation to a public participation process.
It is envisaged that the outcome of the public participation process will pave the way for the municipality to lease the Rooiwal and Pretoria West power stations to potential independent power producers.
Brink bemoaned the fact that daily rolling blackouts impacted negatively on infrastructure and the City’s maintenance budget, adding that Tshwane made a loss of more than R2 billion on the sale of electricity.
“About 10 years ago you could sell electricity (and) make up money to maintain your network and then cross-subsidise other services. Now municipalities in this country found themselves in a position where many of us sell electricity at a loss. Now that has serious implications.
“And so any municipality in the country that is not answering the question of what we are going to do about load shedding is not in fact doing its job.”
Earlier this year, the City appointed an energy task team from various departments to look at how the metro can become more independent from Eskom.
“They are looking at procuring and generating 1 000MW in the next three years. The City of Tshwane currently uses 2 600MW,” Brink said.
Part of the task team’s work was to look at the configuration of the power network, “because if we produce energy independent from Eskom it is to be fed into the network”.
Brink said the city had a small-scale embedded generation energy policy, which was outdated and needed to be updated.
“We will be preparing for an energy indaba where we will be taking a request for proposal on the use of power stations such as these (on public participation) to the market and also soliciting information on independent clean energy generation,” he said.
Brink mentioned that municipal power stations were falling into disuse with no power being generated since 2012/2013.
“This facility (Rooiwal) can produce a small amount of electricity but the problem is it is not enough and the quality of coal that it uses is poor and so you have to stockpile a lot of coal,” he said.
Utilities Services MMC Themba Fosi said it cost the municipality at least R300 million a year to keep the power stations under its care, including paying the staff salaries.
Sello Mphaga, head of the energy task team, said depending on the outcome of the public participation
process, the proposal would be taken back to the council at the end of October.
The council would then be expected to give the green light to the municipality to continue with the process of issuing a “request for proposal” from potential private power generators.
Maphanga said the request for proposal could be issued in November and expected a contract for Rooiwal to be concluded at the end of 2023/2024 financial year.
Pretoria News