The cash-strapped City of Tshwane is adamant it will end reliance on Eskom. Mayor Celliers Brink announced during his State of the City address that the municipality is looking at entering into deals with independent power producers whom he said are more reliable than the state-owned Eskom. The City’s debt to Eskom currently stands at R 3.3 billion.
“We’ve taken the first steps to achieve 1000 megawatts of energy independence from Eskom by 2026. In January this council approved the report giving permission to proceed with a 40 year lease with the Rooiwaal and Pretoria West power stations and the public responded with overwhelming support. In addition to our plans around the power stations we also put out request for information on alternative energy solutions and that was issued in December last year. This is aimed at soliciting information on moving to cleaner energy technology as well as procuring additional electricity from IPPs. We received 39 bids and the next step will be to
evaluate these bids. This is major progress for the City towards energy independence and we
are now well set on this direction,” he said.
“Because of the damage that load-shedding does to our infrastructure, never compensated, by the loss of electricity brought on by load-shedding and lets be honest, the cost of not taking measures to generate and procure electricity independent of Eskom is gonna far exceed what is gonna cost us to partner with the private sector,” said Celliers.
The mayor said the plan is also supported by the national government and the opposition in the council.
“This is not a controversial position. Our attempts have been supported by even the opposition in the council, the minister of energy has said that we heading in the right direction because we know that the more power the Western Cape and Gauteng can generate independent of Eskom the less pressure that places on Eskom the more that allows Eskom to focus on its transmission business instead of struggling to provide us with sufficient electricity to power up economic growth. Both the ANC and the EFF, the main opposition parties in the City of Tshwane denied supporting Brink’s attempt to source electricity from IPPs with the two saying the metro is simply too broke to do that.
“They did a previous project which was marred in corruption and they went back to try this one that is coming. It will take them three to five years to rebuild our power stations so they will be out of government when those power stations start working that is if there’s money from private sector to invest in those power stations them they cant do it cause our finances are not in good shape,” said ANC councillor Aaron Maluleka.
“EFF councillor Benjamin Disolwane dismissed Brink’s plan as yet another fantasy accusing the
city’s DA led coalition government of selling dreams in order to buy time. These guys always talk the same things repeatedly, they just edit the date, come the date he promises to deliver he wont be there. They’re playing the politics of promising people stuff knowing very well they are not going to deliver,” he said.