Browsing: Energy and sustainability

Data published by the department of public enterprises and Eskom shows just how important the contribution from solar and wind is becoming.

Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan has sketched two scenarios for winter that stretched the bounds of our collective credulity.

An electricity supply crisis is looming in South Africa that could make intermittent outages in the past few months seem trivial by comparison.

Eskom has a plan to keep the lights on for the rest of the year – or, in the worst-case scenario, to implement only stage-one rotational load shedding. Here’s how it intends achieving this promise.

Civil society group Corruption Watch wants five former Eskom board members declared delinquent directors.

Eskom has decided to shake up its rotational power cuts, introducing less frequent load shedding but imposing power interruptions to suburbs of a week at a time.

The conventional wisdom is that a major restructuring of Eskom will address the crisis facing that state-owned utility and the country. But this is misleading.

One of South Africa’s newest power plants, designed to supply the grid during peak-use periods, is defective and has been limited to operate at lower capacity.

The cost of off-grid solar installations has decreased significantly over the last 10 years, with the prices of some components falling nearly 70%, prompting more South Africans to consider ditching Eskom entirely.

Eskom said on Sunday evening that it is unlikely to implement rolling blackouts this week thanks to an improvement in plant performance.