City Power details progress in battle against outages, load shedding
City Power on Thursday announced its readiness to bring on board Short Term Power Purchase Procurement from independent power producers.
The utility marked a milestone of attaining 90 megawatts to help address load shedding in the city.
"We are currently engaging DMRE ( Department of Mineral Resources and Energy) for more units, which will go a long way in addressing the challenges throughout the city about load shedding,” said Environment and Infrastructure MMC, Jack Sekwaila.
Four bidders have been given the green light to procure electricity for the city, out of the 16 that had applied, which the city claims will cost it less than procuring electricity from Eskom.
"The city will be procuring power from four successful bidders, cheaper than we currently procure from Eskom, which is an added advantage. The viable injection points to connect the IPPs have already been identified by City Power.
"The onboarding is the greatest milestone for the City of Johannesburg, which seeks ways to caution its residents and businesses from load shedding while working on attracting much-needed investment post Covid-19 and creating employment for our residents,” said Sekwaila.
City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava said the contract duration for the independent power producers will be three years.
"It is not the 20-year PPA that we will be signing but a three-year PPA. What this does is it allows us to buy power at a cheaper rate than what we are currently paying to Eskom, which therefore means that when we make our submissions to NERSA, when we look at our costs going forward, we get to reduce our cost which means that the increase back to our customers can be slightly reduced in the long term."
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