According to South Africa state owned power utility, electricity supplies in South Africa, the continent’s largest economy, will become more constrained during the next two months, resulting in a possible shortfall of as much as 2,000 megawatts in March.
Mr Brian Dames CEO of Eskom Holdings Ltd told reporters that “Even if we pull all the levers, there’s still a gap.” He said that with electricity demand expected to rise 2% this year, only energy savings by consumers can prevent blackouts.
Mr Dames said that the risk of power outages has also increased during the past three months because of equipment failures at power plants, and more recently, as heavy rains curbed the supply of coal to Eskom’s plants. Anglo American Plc and BHP Billiton Ltd supplies to the utility have been disrupted.
South Africa, the world’s largest ferrochrome producer, suffered blackouts in 2008 as a shortage of capacity led to the temporary shutdown of some of the largest platinum mines and deepest gold operations. Anglo, BHP and Xstrata Plc are among the country’s largest power users.
Mr Peter Attard Montalto an economist at Nomura International Plc said that “It sounds very similar to the last crisis with equipment failures, wet coal and the like, which begs the questions of if they learnt the required lessons that time around. Investors need to be cautious that as the economy recovers the situation is only going to be worse next year before the next power station comes online.”
Mr Dames said that about 10,000 megawatts of Eskom’s capacity is currently unavailable because of planned maintenance and because of equipment failures, and demand is expected to rise to about 30,000 megawatts this week. Eskom’s capacity, including possible power imports, is about 43,000 megawatts. In addition to South Africa, the utility also supplies electricity to neighboring Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
（Sourced from Bloomberg）
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