So, back in the day, the situation regarding Eskom was like this: the State-owned utility was in such good condition that a national power failure was unthinkable. Not only this – the price of electricity was so low that the concept of electricity having a significant cost effect on any user was equally unthinkable. Simply put, electricity didn’t cost money.
Further, Eskom did not have any problems with power generation or the efficiency of its staff. It paid its staff quite well; very well, in fact, and nobody who joined Eskom wanted to leave because there was simply no point in doing so. People joined Eskom, enjoyed working for the utility and retired happily at 65 with a healthy pension.
Eskom held itself out as an ideal in the field that it supplied. Everything was done to top quality and there was no reason for any changes. It sounds ridiculous seen from today’s point of view, but strikes did not occur; if they did occur, they were swiftly ended. Eskom had an excellent short-term manufacturing policy, and the long-term Eskom supply forecast was the envy of the world. Eskom used fuel in the form of coal, and this resulted in a great, if slightly polluting, form of power.
In many ways, it was ideal. I was a senior operations engineer for Eskom and it was great to work for the utility. All this continued until 2000, when Allen Morgan was replaced as Eskom’s president.
At first there were very few alterations: Eskom’s production continued as before and its employee profile remained much as before. But then there were slight changes which those that were sensitive to such matters noticed. It had been Eskom’s policy to build a new power station every so often. The power station that was constructed varied from type to type – it could be a coal-fired power station or a nuclear power station or a hydroelectric power station. Whatever the case might be, it had always been a power station which fitted the long-scale plan of Eskom to continue generating power.
Those of us who did notice realised that Eskom was, in fact, not building any new power stations. Some of us saw this as a problem. Not to build new power stations meant that sooner or later Eskom would run out of reserve power. None of us (and I was of them) believed that Eskom would be so thoughtless as to not continue building power stations. Power stations take about four years to build and thus new construction could not be neglected.
Then a very startling rumour did a rapid circle through the world of those in the know when it came to power stations; Eskom had decided to build private power stations which it would purchase from America. Since Eskom was perfectly capable of building its own power stations, this sounded like madness. Further, since the persons proposed as constructors of these new plants had hardly built any power stations ever, there was further madness involved. The cost of new power stations is extremely high and there are all sorts of items involved in construction which have to be factored in. The concept of any company having sufficient funds to build a power station as a private construction was utter lunacy.
Government got involved. By this time government consisted of people who knew nothing about power stations and were heavily politicised. Whatever they planned was going to go wrong. What they did plan was this: to construct two power stations of a size never built before in South Africa and for these to be constructed by organisations which had never built such power stations before. Moreover, the plants were to be built at an expense that way exceeded previous construction.
In 22 years, government has massively increased the cost of electricity in South Africa and massively cut its availability. Can they ever reverse this? We can hope, but it’s very unlikely this will be achieved in our lifetime.