De Ruyter upbeat SA will experience reduced blackouts in 2024

Outgoing Eskom CEO Andre De Ruyter has conceded that 2023 will be a challenging year, but is optimistic that rolling black outs will be significantly reduced in 2024.

De Ruyter was taking part in a discussion at the ongoing mining indaba in Cape Town. He says there is new generation capacity that’s in the pipeline.

“Increasingly, we are seeing that we are able to attract more private sector generation to the grid. We see it in our stats, people who connect to the grid; we also see it in number(s) collated at Nersa. There’s more than 9000mw of new capacity, which is either in the capacity of being built or in the process of going through engineering, and EIA processes to get connected to the grid,” says de Ruyter.

He says from next year there should be a reduction in incidents of blackouts.

“I think the important thing to emphasise is that we shouldn’t stop there. We have an ageing fleet, we have an unreliable fleet that has been poorly maintained, and we should not sit back and become complacent again and think that we’ve now got 9000mw on the grid. We have to double and accelerate that capacity,” he adds.

VIDEO: Mining Indaba – From 2024 we should see a reduction in incidents of load shedding: de Ruyter [embedded content]