Eskom warned South Africans on Friday to prepare for a protracted power crisis as it struggles to boost the continent’s most advanced economy.
The state company warned that the first three months of next year will be difficult.
“We are going to have a challenging period over the next three months,” Eskom’s COO Jan Oberholzer told a news conference.
“It’s going to be a difficult period.”
South Africa has suffered from power cuts for the past 15 years, but power cuts reached new extremes this year, which Eskom attributes to sabotage, crime and aging power stations.
The country generates most of its power from coal-fired power plants, but it also gets some from Koeberg, a nuclear power plant near Cape Town.
But one unit at the 40-year-old nuclear plant will be offline next year for refurbishments, removing nearly a gigawatt of valuable capacity from the grid.
“The outlook for next year is going to be very limited,” Eskom’s outgoing CEO Andre de Ruyter said during the presentation of the company’s annual financial results.
South Africa needs between four and six gigawatts of additional production capacity and “this has become a matter of extreme urgency,” de Ruyter said.
Currently, the total demand for energy is around 25 gigawatts, according to official statistics.
The outgoing chief executive, who resigned earlier this month but will remain in office until March next year, cited a lack of political support and corruption as some of the obstacles to reclaiming the utility.
Last week, the government said it had begun deploying the military to protect the country’s power plants as the protracted energy crisis worsens.
“Our country (is at risk) of becoming … ungovernable if we don’t tackle fraud, corruption, sabotage and other crimes,” de Ruyter warned.
“Several of our power plants are in the hands of criminal syndicates,” he added.
Results released on Friday showed the company posted a net loss of R12.3 billion for the financial year ending March 2022, compared with a loss of R25 billion during the same period a year earlier.
