'Switch off your lights'

2008-01-31 09:47

Pretoria - Switch off your lights is what government is urging South Africans to do to immediately address what it calls a "national electricity emergency".

On Friday, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin and Minerals and Energy Minister Buyelwa Sonjica outlined several plans to alleviate the country's electricity shortage.

Asked what to tell South Africans about the electricity crisis, Erwin replied: "Switch off your lights if you are not using them."

Earlier during a press conference at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, Erwin said government considered the national power outages as a national emergency.

"It is clear that we are running our power system at utilisation levels that are overstretching maintenance and if we do not stabilise this we could drive our system into higher levels of stress... this we can not do," he said.

Government must share blame

"We are viewing the next two years as being critical. It is also critical to stress that the growth of South Africa's economy at the current healthy levels can continue if we change our behaviour and become more energy efficient".

Erwin added government had to share the blame for the current crisis, saying the country was becoming a victim of its own success with electricity demand growing faster than expected.

"The decision to charge Eskom with the responsibility to embark on a large and urgent build programme in 2004 was in hindsight, late. The president has accepted that this government got its timing wrong," he said.

At its Cabinet Lekgotla held in Pretoria this week several proposals as part of an "emergency campaign" to safe the country's critical power supply.

Government would implement an electricity rationing programme as a "quick hit" solution to address the current power blackouts, said Sonjica.

"We have discussed how quotas will be allocated, who will be exempt from the programme, what incentives and penalties will be in place, when it will start and what legislative enablers we need to have in place for the programme to work," Sonjica said.

When this rationing programme would be implemented was not clear. Eskom's CEO Jacob Maroga said it might take "weeks to months".

Overall savings target of between 10 and 15%

A concept proposal on the rationing programme submitted to cabinet includes quota allocations for various electricity users, penalties and cut-offs, quota trading and flexibility of the programme.

It is designed to achieve the overall savings target of between 10 and 15% over time.

To have an immediate saving of eight percent, industrial users would have to use 10% less, commercial users 15% less, hotels, resorts shopping malls and conference centres 20% less, large office buildings, government and municipalities 15% less, agriculture five percent less, and residences ten percent less electricity.

Penalties, which are yet to be determined, would be given for electricity use above the allocated quota and electricity supply to repeat offenders would be cut off.

An incentive scheme is being established for smaller consumers who exceed the savings targets, while large consumers could trade the unused portion of their quota allocations.

Besides the rationing programme, Sonjica also outlined several other plans in the pipeline, such as replacing incandescent light in the country's households with compact fluorescent lights which government hoped would save 750MW by 2010.

Included in this plan was a free CFL exchange for poor households.

"In order to ensure that this roll-out is sustained, we intend to issue restrictions on the manufacturing of incandescent light bulbs," Sonjica said.

A programme is already underway to install one million solar water heaters over the next three years which will save around 650MW.

Government plans to implement "smart metering" in residential areas which will enable the municipalities and Eskom to remotely manage customer loads.

Other plans include converting traffic lights and public lights, switching from electricity to liquefied petroleum gas, and to compel hospitals to use solar power for water heating.

- SAPA