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South Africa’s state-owned Eskom’s Group has met with more than 70 private and listed companies to find sustainable solutions to the country's electricity woes.
“The purpose of the discussions was to identify initiatives where the parties can collaborate and plant the seeds of opportunity to leverage private sector investment capacity and harvest the low-hanging fruit in the electricity industry,” said Chief Executive Officer André de Ruyter, who represented the company in the meeting.
During the session, he shared Eskom’s strategy to address the security of power supply by increasing capacity and reducing demand.
He urged the executives of the top companies and large electricity users to coordinate efforts towards supporting the state utility’s strategy by pursuing opportunities to make investments and realising savings benefits from the reforms of the electricity industry.
On June 28, Eskom implemented the worst power cuts in more than two years after 10 of its generation units went offline and a strike hampered efforts to bring them back online, Reuters reported.
Last week, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa unveiled an action plan, which included a doubling in the allocation for the next renewables procurement round, to end the power crisis.
(editing by Cleofe Maceda)
