Durban — While the eThekwini Energy Transformation Summit continues today (Thursday) the KwaZulu-Natal Tenants and Homeless People’s Trust is taking a building owner to court.
The summit is being held in Durban where local and provincial governments are exploring methods to address the energy crisis in the province.
In January, the KwaZulu-Natal Tenants and Homeless People’s Trust raised an issue with the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) policy directive and felt that their rights had been violated following the privatisation of water and electricity supply.
“As a government watchdog, the decisions you apply have to be on an equitable basis, but instead you have thrown every tenant on a prepaid system to a pack of wolves who are mauled on a daily basis,” said the trust.
“The privatisation of our water and electricity is one of the biggest contributory factors to poverty in our country,” said the trust.
It said it had made contact with government departments and Nersa but received no response.
The CEO of Sandock Austral and the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry, NPC Prasheen Maharaj, stressed the importance of small, medium and micro-enterprises (SMMEs) who could face an existential crisis.
Maharaj said there were four fundamental issues that impacted the distribution of electricity by the city. These included aged equipment.
Maharaj said many of the substations, transformers and other distribution networks were installed in the 1970s and had not been upgraded to cope with current demand.
“There is a lack of informed and scheduled preventative maintenance on the above distribution equipment. There is a lack of timeous restoration and replacement of key equipment post-April 2022 floods. We are also dealing with crime, which includes the theft of cables and deliberate sabotage of infrastructure,” said Maharaj.
“Let us look at the solutions and work together with the public sector to try to implement the solutions. The time to act is now. We cannot allow our business, infrastructure and the provincial economy to suffer. We need to build a prosperous city,” he said.
He said one of the solutions was energy security and the government needed to work with the private sector.
“Develop detailed public/private partnerships with corporates who are willing to support the maintenance and upgrade of infrastructure with reference to distribution. Amendments to regulations to support this are not only necessary, to be honest, it’s our only hope,” said Maharaj.
Maharaj said: “Citizens do not need grand plans and speeches. They require tangible actions. They need to know if the government will provide the budget or will it be private or will it be a combination of both.”
At the summit, KwaZulu-Natal Premier Nomusa Dube-Ncube said among the objectives of the regulations are to assist the energy-generating entities to restore their capacity to generate electricity and provide for an array of measures to protect and provide relief to the public, and to deal with the effects of the disaster.
Dube-Ncube said the regulations called on government institutions, among others, to adopt energy-saving measures to contain the effects of the disaster and to prevent the escalation of the electricity supply shortfall.
Society also calls for installation of alternative energy sources or other measures to provide an uninterrupted power supply for health facilities, water infrastructure and other specified essential services.
Dube-Ncube said that the South African Reserve Bank had been on record in predicting that unless drastic measures were adopted, there would be 250 days of power blackout in 2023, which translates to a historic economic loss of $12.7 billion.
Dube-Ncube suggested that the long-term solution to the energy demand in KZN, and indeed elsewhere, was to ultimately transition to alternative energy sources at the corporate and household level and suggested transitioning to solar energy as it was one of the more sustainable, and potentially has the scale, with the potential to reduce both water use and carbon emissions.
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