Cape Town – Outgoing Eskom boss André de Ruyter said the power utility would appreciate the City of Cape Town’s plans to escape dependence on the embattled parastatal coming to fruition, as it will “save us a lot of money”.
This comes as the City of Cape Town, in recent years, announced lofty plans to break away from Eskom, all in attempt to end crippling blackouts.
These plans includes the building of its first grid-connected solar plant.
Construction on the 7MW project is expected to begin this year, and the development is expected to come into operation by next year.
The plant, which will be situated in Atlantis, is also going to be the first of its kind, which will be connected to the province's power grid.
The plant would supply 14.7 GWh of clean power annually for two decades.
Other plans to cut its reliance on Eskom include, but are not limited to, buying power on the open market, with the second phase of its major independent power producer (IPP) procurement due to be announced soon.
The City also wants businesses and residents to sell power back to the municipality and roll out incentives for voluntary energy savings under a new power heroes programme.
While many might think that Eskom would forfeit income, De Ruyter, who will vacate office end of March, made it clear that the state-owned entity would gain at the end of the day.
“If a city like Cape Town goes off the Eskom grid, it will enable us to reduce our consumption of diesel, which, by the way, we don’t cover in full in our tariff,” De Ruyter told Weekend Argus.
“It’s a move that we welcome. We are not opposed to the move. We think, in the short term, it will add capacity to the grid. It’s financially possible for Eskom and will ease the pressure on our consumption of diesel,” he said.
“The City of Cape Town’s plans in this regard are all viable, and I think that’s the way that the country as a whole should go. There’s a huge opportunity for rooftop solar and for small scale embedded generation to add more capacity to the grid.”
However, De Ruyter said it would require an attractive feed-in tariff - something the City already has in place.
“I think what they are doing is contemplating to increase that tariff to encourage more people to invest in rooftop solar to sell excess electricity back to the grid,” he said.
Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis told Weekend Argus that it would still take three years for the metro to move off the grid.
“When we announced our load shedding plans last February, I already said publicly then that it would take four years,” said Hill-Lewis.
“That is still our timeline, and we are on track, I think.”
However nuclear physicist Dr Kelvin Kemm described the City of Cape Town's plan to wean itself from Eskom as a pipe dream. "They won't achieve this, not in the slightest. You can't just survive of solar and wind. The sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't blow all the time. No country in the world just makes use of solar and wind,“ he said.
“They need Koeberg. It's not viable at all. I agree with De Ruyter that it will save Eskom money, but then the City will be in the dark."
Hill-Lewis hit back, saying Kemm was misunderstanding their plans.
"We are just trying to make up the gap that Eskom can't supply, the gap results in load shedding. I understand perfectly well that we need base load," he added.
De Ruyter also confirmed that the City of Cape Town was still in talks with Eskom about its ambitious plan to take over supplying power to more residences in the metro.
Last year, Weekend Argus reported on the fact that the City is engaging with the power utility on how Eskom customers can be transferred to the City’s grid. This involves plans to purchase some of the utility’s infrastructure to enable such a move.
“The talks are ongoing. There are a number of benefits to such a move,” said De Ruyter.
“Not only are there operational synergies, but there is also an alignment between political accountability and accountability for service delivery, which is all in the interest of Cape Town. It allows us to also optimise our own distribution grid in order to make sure that we don’t end up serving areas that are difficult to access and that have a very low payment rate.”
Weekend Argus.