Statement by Cape Town Mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis

Eskom’s announcement of further load-shedding until Saturday should deeply concern every South African.

The announcement was made only a few hours after news broke that the national economy contracted back to pre-pandemic size in the second quarter of this year. The national GDP contracted by 0,7% in Q2 in quarter-on-quarter terms, data showed.

This is, sadly, unsurprising. This year has seen the worst year of blackouts on record, at some of the highest “stages” ever. Each stage of load-shedding costs the national economy R500 million per stage per day; the two weeks of stage 6 load-shedding in late June/early July destroyed R4,2 billion worth of wealth per day.

Load-shedding is the single biggest driver of unemployment and therefore the single biggest driver of poverty. The more the national economy continues to bleed jobs and wealth, the further this acute socio-economic crisis will become a chronic and unfixable disaster.

In July, I proposed a 10-point plan to the President to immediately begin solving the power crisis. While certain of our proposals have been implemented, several important ones have not. This is disappointing news for every South African whose livelihood is affected by our country’s economic malaise.

In Cape Town, however, we do not believe in sitting around waiting for the national government to take bold and decisive action.

The City continues in its efforts to end load-shedding over time and bring down the cost of electricity for its customers. We are in the final stages of evaluating technical bids on our IPP tender, to bring new generation onto the grid. We have announced that commercial small-scale embedded generators (SSEGs) will now be able to sell on their excess electricity to the City for cash. Our pilot project for wheeling is under way and we are actively exploring options for storage to enable greater use of renewables in our energy mix.

Thankfully, we can announce that the City will once again be mitigating Eskom’s load-shedding for the benefit of its customers. There will be no load-shedding in Cape Town today and tomorrow while the rest of the country is on Stage 2.

Further announcements regarding mitigation up to the weekend — depending on the state of water reserves at Steenbras — will be made in due course.

Source: City Of Cape Town