Busisiwe Mavuso | There's light at the end of the load shedding tunnel - it's just far away

Necom was unable to announce any sudden breakthrough to end load shedding because, bluntly, there is none, but the briefing was important both for business planning and confidence and for the people suffering so severely with the power cuts, writes Busisiwe Mavuso.

The one "new" item that came from the National Energy Crisis Committee (Necom) briefing at the weekend is that a new integrated resource plan (IRP) will be issued in March. The rest of Necom’s report was an update on the measures already implemented and it does reflect that there is a huge amount of work going on to try to improve things – even though progress is slow.

But with about 12 000MW due to come on stream over the next two years or so, there is light at the end of the tunnel although time frames remain obscure. Necom says private-sector embedded generation projects with total capacity of 9 000MW are being developed, along with 2 800MW that have made it through bid windows 5 and 6, and 300MW imported from neighbouring countries.