By Neelam Rahim

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s energy plan to tackle South Africa’s power crisis has been widely welcomed. The President addressed the nation on Monday night, announcing actions to respond to the energy crisis that has negatively impacted the country for years.

Unpacking the entailing of this plan, Radio Islam International discusses with energy expert Chris Yelland.

Chris welcomes the plan as it is very comprehensive in its scope and gets to the heart of the matter. 

He says we now have to move to implementation and several next steps that need to be taken, including actions by the minister of rural resources and energy to put into effect the legal and regulatory framework that allows what the President has indicated. 

We hope that this will be done quickly as this is an emergency plan requiring immediate action, he added.

Chris further tells Radio Islam that in a plan like this, one has to have many irons in the fire because some of these plans may not work out. 

He says from his personal view. Currently, we have load shedding, which means there is no generation reserve. Needed first is more generation capacity to the grid so that there are adequate reserves for the maintenance to get done without shutting down the existing plant. 

According to Chris, this initiative has many other positive plans as we advance. 

As a report emerged last week, there were concerns that Eskom was planning to charge consumers even if they went totally off the grid.

According to Chris, this was not mentioned in the President’s speech. He talked about another way of incentivising what is known as a feed-in tariff. You allow customers to generate into the grid at a specific price per kilowatt an hour. That provides an incentive over billed on solar PV on homes or roofs, as you have access capacity that you can sell to the grid to be compensated for through a feed-in tariff. 

He says that is a powerful incentive that changes the business case, which is welcome.

Regarding penalising people who put in other PV systems, we must acknowledge that those tariffs are not yet promulgated. They have not even gone out for public comment yet. He added that new messaging from the President might change how these are implemented.

Listen to the full interview on Radio Islam’s podcast below.