Parliament - South Africans could face more power cuts, as the
distribution grid will gradually collapse from 2015 unless a maintenance
backlog is addressed, an expert said on Thursday.
"We are three years away from collapse," Deon Louw, the
deputy director of electro-technical services in Overstrand
municipality, Western Cape, told MPs.
"It is going to collapse in stages, as some parts are older than others. We will see power failures."
Louw told public hearings on the electricity
distribution industry - hosted by Parliament's portfolio committee on
energy - that the lifespan of a distribution network was 50 years, and
said the various components of South Africa's had an average age of 47
years.
He said power failures were often wrongly blamed on
Eskom's generation capacity, when in fact the fault lay with the ageing
distribution infrastructure.
Two days of hearings have seen experts reiterate
warnings that the country faced a R35bn backlog in distribution
maintenance, of which R10bn was needed on the Eskom network, while
the rest referred to municipal networks.
But Louw said municipalities often "stole" from their
maintenance funds to cover other unforeseen expenses, such as higher
than expected salary increases.
"That is often the one area where they can reduce expenditure."
Louw said at the moment R3.5bn was spent annually
on ongoing maintenance, but the figure needed to increase to R6.5bn.
His comments added to a bleak portrayal by other
presenters in two days of hearings, of how poorly managed municipalities
failed to perform maintenance though power distribution was a revenue
source.
The National Planning Commission proposed that national
energy regulator Nersa take a driving role in redressing the situation,
pointing out that it had the means to force municipalities to act.
But the regulator cautioned that the sanctions it could
impose on errant municipalities, including revoking their distribution
licences, were firstly not a fast cure, and secondly not always
realistic.
Nersa's Thembani Bukula said municipalities did not fail to perform maintenance purely because they lacked expertise or funding.
"Sometimes there is no alternative to switch to [other
parts of the network] while performing maintenance on one part of the
network, or then you lose supply," Bukula said.
He said though Nersa could ringfence funding for maintenance, this did not guarantee the money would be spent for that purpose.
The hearings saw a call for a one percent levy to be
charged on distribution to add to funding, to ease the backlog, but also
a warning from business against further price escalation.
Nedbank chief economist Dennis Dykes said businesses
had gone from spending 5% of their budget on electricity in
2005/06 to 11% at present, and if tariffs increased as expected
this would reach 15% in five years' time.
Thus pressed, companies would save on labour and this would impact on employment, he said.
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