Energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa plans to secure funding approval soon for a 2.5GW nuclear power plant in efforts to increase electricity supply, the Sunday Times reported.

Work has reached an advanced stage, and a team is working on a deal and finalising the procurement structure for the project, energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa told the newspaper.

Ramokgopa, who first announced the plan last December, hopes national treasury will sign off on the plan by next month. A site is yet to be confirmed and various technical details are still being ironed out.

The proposed power station would be bigger than the Koeberg plant, north of Cape Town, which is South Africa’s only nuclear power plant and generates 1.94GW of energy.

The latest nuclear technology “is very rapid to deploy, relatively cheaper and more efficient”, Ramokgopa told the newspaper. “We must resolve the issues of who will operate the plant, but I think I can say before we even conclude that it will be Eskom, as Eskom has the experience, having done that at Koeberg.”

Eskom has struggled for years to adequately supply electricity to South Africans from its ageing fleet of generation facilities, with problems exacerbated by mismanagement and corruption.

Energy crisis

The energy crisis has hurt economic activity and in 2023 resulted in GDP growth of just 0.7%, the slowest rate of expansion since the pandemic in 2020.

The electricity provider has begun to see an improvement in generating performance and has not implemented rolling power cuts for more than 100 days, it said in a statement on Friday. — Ntando Thukwana, (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP