The City of Johannesburg is amongst a number of municipalities in South Africa that intends to disconnect from the troublesome Eskom. The decision is in response to the mass power outages caused by infrastructure sabotage and leader incompetence at Eskom.
Nickolaus Bauer, spokesperson of the Environment and Infrastructure Services Department for the City of Johannesburg, mentions that the municipality of Johannesburg will accept proposals by independent power producers in the coming weeks.
City Power will manage the initiative, allowing the energy generated by third parties to be supplied and distributed into the electricity grid. This constant supply of power will assist in alleviating the electricity shortage affecting households and businesses in South Africa.
“We’re hoping we’ll be able to put megawatts into the grid that will lessen the effects of load shedding, to the point that when the entire country is called for stage four, hopefully, we’ll be able to only implement stage two and the like”, Bauer said.
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A multi-layered scheme
This initiative is supported by other energy-saving schemes that the City of Johannesburg means to implement. Baur mentions that the industry will be looking into varying renewable energy supplies such as gas and solar.
They will begin installing solar panels at the headquarters of City Power. At the same time, removing the old bulbs from the streetlights and replacing them with LED lights which are proven to save up to 5 times more electricity.
“We’re hoping that this is the beginning of us ending our alliance on Eskom”, he continues. “It’s early days. You don’t want to be able to say that next week you can kiss Eskom goodbye because that’s just not realistic”.
But even though the local government will be searching for solutions to the electricity crisis, Bauer maintains that the citizens of South Africa have a role to play in saving electricity.
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Obstacles to overcome
The problems at Eskom have been going on for nearly two decades, and it does not seem that the crisis will be resolved soon. As such, the blackouts have prompted citizens and businesses to look into solar energy as an alternative to Eskom.
A move that has been discouraged by the energy suppliers when they announced that people will still need to pay a fee of R1000 to keep their connection open to the grid as insurance.
However, Baur states that the multi-party government in Johannesburg is eager to implement the program and that they will be working around any obstacles. How long will it take, and much will it cost? He can not give a definitive answer yet, but the initiative is a step in the right direction.
“I’m going to remind everybody to watch this space. The things happening in Johannesburg, it can be very reminiscent of what’s happening in Cape Town. The mayor down there unveiled the hydroelectric power initiative [that] also shields Cape Town’s residents from higher levels of load shedding. And we basically want to do the same here in Johannesburg. We cannot have a Johannesburg, which is the economic powerhouse of the country and of the continent, be hobbled by load shedding”, said Bauer.
