Africa’s most industrialized economy has faced repeated power outages over the past decade as its power plants age.
South Africa is developing new legislation to speed up power projects to add generation capacity and help end power cuts, a presentation seen by Reuters on Tuesday from the country’s energy crisis committee showed.
Aging coal-fired power plants, insufficient investment in new capacity and delayed policies to encourage private providers have left South Africa facing constant power cuts.
However, work is underway to speed up the acquisition of additional capacity, according to a presentation by the National Energy Crisis Committee, created by President Cyril Ramaphosa.
He said the committee is working to “develop emergency legislation that can be tabled in Parliament to allow energy projects to move forward more quickly and allow for coordinated and decisive action.”
He added that a “web of bureaucracy” was making it difficult to manage the energy crisis and that “the current regulatory framework was not designed to deal with an energy deficit.”
The document noted that progress has been made on the Energy Action Plan that Ramaphosa announced in July, including increasing license requirements for private integrated generation projects and power imports.
Ramaphosa will meet with different stakeholders this week to discuss ways to deal with the worst power outages in the country.
In a meeting attended by political party leaders, it was revealed that the electricity shortage appeared to continue until at least 2024.
The largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, announced on Tuesday that it will go to court to stop recent “unaffordable rate increases” approved by the energy regulator.
The party also wanted the implementation of continuous power cuts declared unconstitutional.
Leaders of smaller opposition parties and some companies threatened legal action over the power outages on Monday when they sent a letter from a lawyer to outgoing Eskom chief executive Andre de Ruyter and public companies minister Pravin Gordhan.
