Browsing: Eskom South Africa

Switching from coal to renewable energy is vital for South Africa to stabilize its power output and to create employment. The switch from coal to renewable energy is costly and many African nations are dragging their feet.

The situation is further exasperated by the fact that of recent years, many African nations have been discovering oil and many more are conducting explorations offshore. The potential of changing their economies from the sale of crude oil is far too promising to forgo.

This is a point that will be driven home at the upcoming COP27 in Egypt later this year. Africa will be looking to push the West to provide funding for the renewable energy transition. This time around, the South Africa deal stands as a concrete example that with sufficient funding, the transition is not only doable but plausible and strung with multifaceted benefits including employment.…

Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned power utility, and currently facing enormous workload in generating reliable power for the most diverse economy in Africa has been served with a compliance notice by the nation’s environment ministry, high levels of air pollution being the cause.

According to information from Bloomberg, Eskom’s biggest operational power plants are struggling to remain active as the pollution levels are not yet repaired accordingly.

The heavily relied on power utility has failed to fully repair pollution-abatement equipment at its 4 116-megawatt Kendal power plant that began malfunctioning in early 2018 and was damaged further in a strike later that year.

The ministry issued the notice in December saying the plant would need to shut down two of its six generating units, 1 and 5 if the action wasn’t taken to bring them back into compliance.

Hence, according to the notice, it demanded maintenance plans for the rest.

South …