Enigin Update - South Africa Face Mandatory Energy Conservation
SOUTH Africa’s state utility Eskom could try for a mandatory Energy Conservation Scheme (ECS), if energy savings fall below 10 percent by commercial and domestic consumers.
Eskom revealed the ECS proposal in a statement yesterday, but it will need government approval before it can be actioned. The utility also said that their voluntary ECS aimed for the 500 largest electricity consumers may do enough to maintain supply, and so far 134 participating businesses had saved at least 5 percent.
Brian Dames, Eskom chief executive, said: “We would like to see a voluntary scheme but a mandatory scheme may be necessary as a last resort to prevent disruptive load shedding, but this would be a government decision.”
As we reported over the last few months, Eskom implemented an energy efficiency campaign and standard winter tariffs, which are 3.5 times higher than summer tariffs, leading to significant lower energy demand from the larger power users.
South Africa were threatened with black-outs over the last few months, due to an under capacity of power generation and expected increased demand, but the above actions, including energy saving and efficiency, and hence a lower demand averted the disruptions.
Dames revealed that overall energy demand fell short of forecasts throughout the majority of the winter (southern hemisphere). The peak demand was just 1.4 percent lower than the previous winter, partly due to slower than anticipated economic activity, but enough to deal with their problems.
“The risk in summer is not the capacity to meet demand, we have enough capacity. The issue is to have enough reserves for maintenance,” Dames added.
Eskom generally performs maintenance across its plants during the summer, as demand is lower. Their maintenance period generally runs from September until mid-May and generally requires generation plants coming off-line.
A mandatory ECS could badly hit South Africa's industry and commerce if they have not improved their energy efficiency and gained control of their energy use through precise energy management.
Enigin Distributors throughout South Africa are helping the private and public sectors to gain control of their energy use through Enigin plc's Eniscope and related hardware, reducing energy demand, emissions and energy costs.
Picture of South Africa Cape Town by Derek Keats, reproduced under Creative Commons License.
