Professor Mark Swilling, says that the task set for the new board of Eskom to achieve an energy availability factor (EAF) of 75% is completely impossible. 

Speaking at the Kgalema Motlanthe Foundation (KMF) forum on inclusive growth in the Drakensberg on Saturday, Swilling, who is also a member of the National Planning Commission (NPC), made the point that half of SA's 90 electricity generation units were out of service due to breakdown in September, triggering stage 6 loadshedding. 

Said Swilling: I have an uneasy feeling that some recent decisions in the appointment of the new board are inappropriate, and I'm referring specifically to the mandate to this board to achieve a 75% energy availability. In fact, our energy availability factor has been declining for about 17 years.

It was not only the old power stations that had a low EAF, said Swilling, but some of the newer ones. Tutuka power station, for instance – known as Eskom's most corrupt power station – was relatively new but had an EAF of 30%. The brand new power stations Medupi and Kusile were also underperforming at 54% and 73% when Swilling did his research in 2021. 

Swilling, who was speaking in his academic capacity as Professor of Sustainable Development at Stellenbosch University but is also the chair of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, said that while it was usually the task of the CEO to inform the board of directors on operations and the options available, in this instance, the board was mandated to achieve a 75% EAF across the fleet without input from the executive.

"Now, to achieve that, you have to fix those 90 machines across the 15 power stations. The problem with these machines is that they are like aeroplanes. If you want to fix an aeroplane, you can't do it while flying. You can only fix an aeroplane by landing it, putting it into a hangar and opening it up. That takes a long time.

"But that's what you have to do. You have to take them off the grid in a systematic way, shut them down, repair them, rehabilitate them, and bring them back onto the grid. But you can't do that because you would plunge SA into permanent loadshedding."

He said the only solution was to build new generation to create the space for Eskom to shut down some machines, fix them properly and bring them back on the grid. The fastest and most cost-effective way is to build renewable energy capacity. 

"No matter what you think of renewable energy and whether you're a greenie or not, technologically, it's an indisputable fact that the only generation capacity you can bring on-scale and on-budget in two years is renewable energy," Swilling said. 

Swilling said that the good news was that SA was beginning to take the right decisions. He estimates that there are currently 16.9 gigawatts of new generation capacity in the pipeline through the government's renewable energy independent power producers procurement programme and private sector companies, which are building their own generation capacity. 

The National Planning Commission has estimated that 10 gigawatts of renewable energy generation capacity added to the grid within the next two years can end loadshedding.