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JEREMY MAGGS: Eskom is to receive an additional 1000 megawatts of gas-fired energy from Mozambique, all part of the Minister of Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa’s, ongoing plan to add more power to our struggling grid. The additional supply of power, says government, will enable the power utility to reduce load shedding by one stage. Let’s discuss this further now with Hilton Trollip, independent consultant in energy research and a research fellow in the Global Risk Governance Programme. Hilton, a very warm welcome, no doubt a move like this is to be welcomed.
HILTON TROLLIP: Thanks for the welcome, Jeremy. Good afternoon. Yes, it is to be welcomed but with caveats. So to put this into perspective, what I’ve managed to glean [from] the announcements, they’re a bit short on facts on this, but they’re credible announcements. Firstly, in the shortish term, two months or so, we can get 80 megawatts to 100 megawatts of power from Mozambique. We don’t know exactly where that’s going to come from. It seems it’s from a private supplier and it’s going be bought by a private customer in South Africa but made available on the grid. So 80 megawatts, 100 megawatts, that’s a tenth of one stage of load shedding, or about a quarter of one of the big units at Medupi, just one of the big units.
So bit of a help, everything’s welcome. Then the next phase is they say that within six months or so, it could go up to 500 megawatts and then a bit longer, a year, to 1000 megawatts. All of that, once again, not much detail, but what we’d expect is this would also be gas-fired electricity, gas-fuelled electricity production and this most likely would come from Mozambique’s huge Rovuma gas field in northern Mozambique.
One thousand megawatts is a stage of load shedding. It would be in a year, the timeframe in which many politicians have said there’d be no load shedding. Anyway, I’ve never said that. So ja, it’ll be welcome in a year, definitely.
But the caveats are the gas fields in Rovuma, well onshore, there’s a province called Cabo Delgado, which has been experiencing a very severe insurrection since 2017.
The World Bank says more than 4 000 people have been killed, and more than a million people displaced, and much of this insurrection is reported to be driven by a group called Al-Shabaab. They’re a local group, they don’t come from the Middle East, or the Arabian Peninsula, or anywhere else in North Africa. They’re local and reportedly – and these are fairly credible reports – they’re indigenous and they’re not very impressed with the level to which the gas discovery is benefiting local communities. So that is the big caveat, if you’ve got a famine in your country, if you’re going to get food from somewhere else, and it’s going to cause untold misery, you have to make some principles clear in the deal.
I think we need a lot more transparency … and also the Mozambican government is meant to be democratic, but in the last elections, the European Union, the Commonwealth local election observers said the election was rigged. Then one last comment, I want [to make] just by the way, I want electricity for South Africa, but not under all conditions.
Then the last point is; in sub-Saharan Africa, all other oil-rich countries have seen great misery linked to the exploitation of their hydrocarbon. So if you look at Nigeria, and you look at Angola, and you look at the state of poverty, democracy, human rights, [the] Human Development Index, and so on, they’re like Mozambique. I think is close to the tenth most poverty stricken country in the world. So we have to be careful who we are dealing with.
JEREMY MAGGS: Hilton, I’ve got two other questions. What do we know about cost and why have we not done this earlier?
HILTON TROLLIP: As you probably know, Jeremy, we get 2 000MW from Cabora Bassa at quite a good deal. I can’t name the cost, but in the past, I’ve seen it’s competitive. Why we haven’t done it earlier is because earlier on there was no production of gas in this Rovuma area because of the insurrection … I don’t know of any production at the moment, so it might well be speculative.
This is why I say it’s credible, we know the gas is there, we know the gas can get turned into electricity.
Also, to build gas turbines, you can do it very quickly and they are low cost, they’re simple things. They’re units that can just be brought in. They’re built all over the world quickly, all the time. The thing is, what is the situation in Carbo Delgardo, where that gas is coming from? We don’t know and we don’t know the details. So I think we should demand them, especially if any public funds are going near this or any treaties to government deals. We need to know the costs, we need to know all the parties involved, we need to know the terms and so on, and we don’t.
JEREMY MAGGS: Just one other issue very quickly. There seems to be an improvement to the power utility’s plants per plant performance. We are seeing diminution of load shedding; it seems things are improving. The chairman of Eskom (Mpho Makwana) says a change in its management structure has helped improve plant performance. Do you have a view on that?
HILTON TROLLIP: I do have a view. If you look at, anybody can look at Eskom plant performance, you type in Eskom data portals in Google and there you have a wealth of information. I’ve got it open on my screen, what it shows is that starting at around about the beginning of June, the unplanned outages, which had been hovering around the 18 000MW mark, are now around the 16 000MW mark. So, that’s two stages of load shedding through fewer unplanned outages. Not only fewer, it’s only gone from about 15% of the fleet is unplanned outage to 13%. So it is an improvement to be welcomed, Eskom is to be congratulated, but that’s only two stages of load shedding.
The other, what we’re experiencing now with less load shedding is there are a number of other components. Firstly, planned outages are lower than I’ve ever seen them. So, we are getting about another two stages of load shedding from having less machines, having less routine maintenance done, and we could see problems down the line. We’ve had this in the past.
Then there’s another thing, you can see it in the stats, but also from Eskom generation executive Eric Shunmagum. He said, and you can see this in the statistics, for the past week or so, with winter being here, we get much better performance from our wind fleet, which is quite big. So, we’ve had about another two stages of load shedding from that. Then lastly, the tariff increase has decreased demand, so we’ve got a bit more there. So, about a third of that from the improved planned outages. I believe that the Eskom chair is jumping to conclusions when you have a two-week improvement in a fleet of 80 units.
JEREMY MAGGS: Hilton Trollip, we are going to leave it there. As always, thank you very much for the insight.
