President Cyril Ramaphosa has appealed to the board of Eskom to suspend its biggest electricity price increase in more than a decade as the nation faces two more years of rolling blackouts.

Eskom won approval by the national energy regulator to raise electricity tariffs by an inflation-beating 18.65% and by a cumulative 33.8% over two years.

“It will not be fair to impose the tariff on our people while there is load shedding,” he said.

Ramaphosa’s comments come after Eskom said the country could face two years of persistent blackouts as it overhauls its ageing power stations.

South Africa is suffering from an energy crisis, with Eskom implementing blackouts for more than 200 days last year and every day so far in 2023. The rolling outages are needed to protect the grid from collapse when the company’s ageing, mostly coal-fed plants can’t meet demand.

An additional 6GW of capacity is needed to stabilise the grid and a “great deal of progress” is being made in unlocking logjams to close the shortfall, Ramaphosa said.

Read: Continuous load shedding for the next two years: Eskom

In addition to procuring extra capacity, the government will ensure Eskom’s diesel-fed power stations at Gourikwa and Ankerlig have enough fuel to boost power output when its coal-fired plants can’t meet demand, he said. That would reduce the severity of outages. — (c) 2023 Bloomberg LP