“A major contributor to the performance we are seeing is that demand has not peaked to levels we had envisaged,” the minister said, though he cautioned that demand is likely to rise in the weeks ahead.
“If we can keep up energy savings from demand-side measures we can sustain this trend and reduce the severity of load-shedding,” Ramokgopa said. The minister said a legal mechanism was necessary to address projects that did not use their right to access the grid, preventing others who were ready to connect to the grid from doing so. A prescribed time limit on exercising the right should be applied rather than it being open-ended as at present. The aim was to get extra megawatts onto the grid as soon as possible.
He will meet his Mozambiquan counterpart Monday to access a minimum of 80MW of power generated by a powership.