- Ramaphosa laments load shedding
- Admits, load shedding may continue for a while
South Africa’s President, Cyril Ramaphosa, has lamented the recent load shedding upgrade by state-owned electric utility Eskom to a Stage 4. In a press conference, Ramaphosa stated that load shedding presents the most significant risk to several sectors in the country.
”The independent power producers are pumping in whatever they can, but the majority of them are still under construction,” Ramaphosa said. ”The direction that we now need to move towards is to restructure Eskom to have a separate generation entity that can purchase power from other producers,” he added.
”We do want to have a measure of competition there so that we can all know that when the machines break down, there are others there.” he continued.
Ramaphosa added that South Africa is ‘in a very difficult and precarious situation’, and load shedding may continue for a while. ”We have heard from the Eskom CEO (Andre de Ruyer) that load shedding will be with us for a while,” Ramaphosa said.