Photo by: Duane Daws
TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – JSE- and NYSE-listed miner Sibanye Gold on Thursday said that despite South African electricity utility Eskom’s request to reduce its power consumption by 10%, Sibanye did not expect any production losses.
The company, which was last year spun out of gold major Gold Fields and was entrusted with the majority of Gold Fields’ South African assets, said that the electricity-saving request followed an initial request to reduce consumption by 20%, owing to a significant loss of generation capacity from Eskom’s coal-fired power stations.
Sibanye said that it had previously, in cooperation with Eskom, developed contingency plans to accommodate requests of this nature.
“The company is implementing the agreed measures to reduce its power usage as requested and does not expect to incur any production losses, unless the situation again escalates. We will continue to assist in the national effort to secure the grid, while managing the supply constraints to our business,” Sibanye said in a statement.
The State-owned electricity producer, which declared its fourth power emergency of the 2013/14 summer maintenance season on Thursday morning, began implementing load shedding from 9:00 Central African Time, causing shops to shut, disrupting cellular networks and raising fresh concerns about the constraint being placed on South Africa’s already poor growth outlook by the country’s electricity shortages.