Mantashe is blocking all the exits from load-shedding

Eskom is having quite a good June. Load-shedding is down and its energy availability factor is up.

Something appears to be going right, though it would be madness to relax. Too much damage has been done to our economy and our society by Eskom’s collapse for anyone to trust it now.

Nonetheless, electricity is more available so far this month than it was last month. Something may be going right. What that might be is anyone’s guess.

The only person in the country who may actually be concerned is mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe.

The better Eskom or the wider power system performs now, however tentatively, the more distant become his fantasies about parking floating gas powerships in our ports or procuring 3,000MW of nuclear power.

You can almost feel the tension, possibly deliberately created by President Cyril Ramaphosa, between Mantashe and electricity minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa.

To an uncomfortable degree they now both have the same powers, a recipe for getting nothing done. But Ramokgopa has something Mantashe doesn’t: access to Eskom.

Surely, though, this lessening of our load can’t be his doing? He has been in the job only a few weeks.

Experts say the improved performance is mainly due to Eskom doing less maintenance during winter. Less plant is taken offline, which is how Eskom fashions its maintenance schedules.

Second, the thermal efficiency of its coal plant improves marginally in winter anyway. And at least on a few June days so far, strong winds have fleetingly seen an increase in the contribution of renewable energy to the grid.

However, the experts fully expect us to be back in the dark, at stage 6 or higher, soon.

The Karpowership tenders are still very much on the cards. Initially brought into play by the late Tina Joemat-pettersson when she was energy minister under Jacob Zuma, the Karpowerships have become a feature of Mantashe’s politics.

More recently, Ramaphosa, Ramokgopa and finance minister Enoch Godongwana, with 2024’s elections front of mind, have also backed the project, though for a far shorter term than the 20 years Mantashe has in mind.

But political support is only half the battle. The projects need finance — there is expensive infrastructure to be built and local banks don’t like it.

Absa has insisted it won’t fund them and it would be a brave bank that, in 2023, finds anything fundable in a technology project quite so obsolete or extravagant.

One willing source of funding may be the state-controlled Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA). Its chair, Prof Mark Swilling, a determined advocate of renewable energy, has recently begun to support Karpowerships. They are, he said recently, “a good idea for emergency supply over the short term ... say five years maximum”, in which, because gas is priced in dollars “we take the punishment and we take the pain”.

That is putting it mildly. Swilling is also an avowed opponent of Mantashe on energy matters, but his support for Karpowership is critical.

He was one of the architects of the Just Energy Transition Plan that won SA pledges worth $8.5bn (R160bn) at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last November.

The problem is that, first, his position at the DBSA is not necessarily secure. He replaced Godongwana when the latter joined the government.

Second, he risks putting DBSA money into what he himself calls a very expensive project provided that we accelerate the creation of a huge renewable energy base — something he cannot control. He also doesn’t buy the Ramokgopa notion that if Eskom could just fix its machines the crisis would be over.

After the February budget, Swilling wrote that “the National Treasury has finally accepted the inevitable — there is little chance that the gradual decline of the energy availability factor from a high of 90% in 2005 to below 50% in 2023 is going to be reversed any time soon, if ever. In short, the likelihood of fixing the machines as the primary means for ending rolling blackouts is finally seen for what it is, a chimera.”

In Greek mythology, a chimera is a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion and a dragon’s tail. In other words, fixing Eskom generation is a dream. But the man in charge of accelerating and of licensing a new renewables base is none other than Mantashe.

Since his appointment to energy in 2019, he has not added a single watt to the grid. So Swilling could find himself buying gas in dollars on the open market while Mantashe stifles renewables. And when five years isn’t enough, which we can guess it might not be, then what?

There are many wars being fought out there over energy. At a conference in May Crispian Olver, who runs the presidential climate commission, called Mantashe an “emperor with no clothes”. But Olver, too, finds a place for gas in his vision for an SA energy future.

Maybe we build our own plant rather than anchor foreign ships in our ports.

Eskom has also looked at encouraging someone to build a big gas power station in Mozambique, near the Mozal aluminium smelter outside Maputo. Mozal has regiments of Eskom power lines marching towards it, so grid connection would be easy.

The difficulty is that advocates for a new energy future like Swilling and Olver are mere officials: here today, gone tomorrow.

The ANC and its politicians are another thing entirely. They never quite go away and they always need money.

Peter Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.

The difficulty is that advocates for a new energy future like Swilling and Olver are mere officials: here today, gone tomorrow. The ANC and its politicians are another thing entirely