Pretoria - There are no plans to cancel the Kusile Power Station project both the Energy Ministry and Eskom have said.
This comes after media reports allegedly misquoting the Acting Deputy Director General for Electricity, Nuclear and Clean Energy Ompi Aphane as saying the coal powered facility, which is being built in Emalahleni, Mpumalanga, is going to be cancelled.
"The department wishes to state categorically and without equivocation that Kusile Power Station is on the table. There is no viable option that is on the table to replace Kusile. In the absence of Kusile there will not be enough power into the South African electricity grid," the department's spokesperson Bheki Khumalo said on Wednesday.
The 800MW plant is expected to be completed in 2017 and with the assistance of other government departments.
Aphane in his presentation to the South African National Energy Association (Sanea) indicated that the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), which outlines what it is that government needs to do to keep the country's lights on, is considering a range of scenarios in order to inform the actual investment plan.
"He further indicated that a distinction has to be made between a scenario and a plan," said the department, adding that media reports had misunderstood the difference.
"One of the scenarios that are being modeled relate to an option where only new coal fired power stations will be built and no renewable energy generation utilized. This, therefore, does not mean that government has made a decision not to build any new renewable energy power stations," said Khumalo.
Eskom said that it was still committed to building Kusile and that it had been in discussions with government to explore various funding options for the project. According to the parastatal, South Africa faces a thin margin between supply and demand over the course of the next ten years particularly in the next three years.
"Eskom is on record saying that in order to plug the gap in electricity supply over the next few years, South Africa needs new base-load power stations like Medupi and Kusile. Funding to complete the Medupi station has recently been approved by the World Bank," said the parastatal.
In April, the World Bank announced it would grant the utility US$3.75 billion loan that will co-finance the 4800 MW Medupi coal-fired power plant in Limpopo as well as the country's first large wind and concentrated power projects.
"We are working hard to resolve the funding issue because there is no viable option to replace Kusile. Without the additional power from Kusile from 2014, there could be constraints on South Africa's economic growth," said Eskom's Finance Director, Paul O'Flaherty.
The ministry says that the IRP will be concluded at the beginning of the fourth quarter.
