Are privately owned power plants the solution?

Are private power plants the solution?

  • Yes

    Votes: 232 84.4%

  • No

    Votes: 13 4.7%

  • Other

    Votes: 30 10.9%
  • Total voters
    275
The Trutherizer said:
Yes. But, not to keep Eskom as we know it today. Eskom can play a great role as the central broker. Their skills at actually generating power is somewhat... lacking. And that can't be fixed in an expedient manner.
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Rubbish. There is nothing wrong with Eskom that proper engineering based management can't fix in Eskom.
Eskoms problem is the stupid idea that a highly technical operation can be run by sociologists, bean counters and marketing idiots all appointed by a corrupt government.
 
Geoff.D said:
Rubbish. There is nothing wrong with Eskom that proper engineering based management can't fix in Eskom.
Eskoms problem is the stupid idea that a highly technical operation can be run by sociologists, bean counters and marketing idiots all appointed by a corrupt government.
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At the core of it, yes.

Eskom needs to be run by technocrats basically. It is so crucial to the functioning of this countries economy that the government can't be entrusted with any aspect of it.
 
Geoff.D said:
Rubbish. There is nothing wrong with Eskom that proper engineering based management can't fix in Eskom.
Eskoms problem is the stupid idea that a highly technical operation can be run by sociologists, bean counters and marketing idiots all appointed by a corrupt government.
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So... How to solve that? In a way which might actually occur before hell freezes over I should add.
 
The reasons I say no:
1-History of modern times, it just get more expensive.
2-You have to differenciate between centralised management and centralised technical systems.
-Centralised management over technical, can end up being a huge problem for the users/customers, meaning its out of touch with the area of operation.
-Splitting up leads to duplication/triplication of top management, which now have to negociate between each other through endless red tape, causing headaches for customers.
3-If a good working entity turn bad, it rot from the top, and if that is not fixed you get multiple times the rot if you split it in sections and overmanaged as wel. The entity that functioned good before had various sections as well, they just operated in sync with dissiline.

So the thing is if you don't understand the problem(Same type of people just different organisation), seeing you could not fix it, splitting it will just aggrevate the problems and cost will rise, yes a few will get rich.

I say this because electricity is one of the basic resources, that cannot be allowed to be mismanaged or conducted at high costs, if so it will exponentially crash monetary systems from the user perspective. The last 30 years this practise happenned and life did not got better for most worldwide, except a few.

You must understand the reason you cannot fix a problem, or it will turn into a chronic situation.
 
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Got me own privately owned power plant. Idiot circus go hump yourselves.
 
I am not sure if the rise of privately owned power utilities would mean good news for consumers. Sure, the capacity problem will be solved, but, I am not sure if that will bring lower costs to the consumer. If the privately owned power plants sell their electricity to Eskom or the municipalities, I can see muncipalities and Eskom not dropping their prices since they the only two that can provide electricity to the consumer. If privately owned power plants can sell directly to the consumer, we may see competitive electricity pricing across the board.
 
other: private power plants must not get exclusive rights to supply an area. i don't want to be stuck paying 100x the price that someone in another place is paying. then, also, if something happens to the CronyPower plant that supplies my area, i don't want GuptaPower to step in to supply electricity at inflated prices.
 
Not the best idea, lest we have another Enron... and bills will be passed for BBBEE compliance.
 
The answer has to be Other for me. Being totally one or the other means that the variety of abuses and limitations to each becomes THE major limitation of that implementation.

Private versus government is not a comparison between renewable and non renewable which is where quite a few posts have gone off the rails.
 
Easter Bunny said:
other: private power plants must not get exclusive rights to supply an area. i don't want to be stuck paying 100x the price that someone in another place is paying. then, also, if something happens to the CronyPower plant that supplies my area, i don't want GuptaPower to step in to supply electricity at inflated prices.
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that is the thing
Each area should have the right to move to any power service that provides reliable power for cheapest price
 
noxibox said:
Private ownership is not the panacea some people like to believe it is.

Somebody has to regulate the market. Anyone who thinks private business can just do this on their own is entirely delusional.
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NERSA is exactly that - important to keep regulator independent from generator. Private ownership does not mean complete deregulation.

Arthur said:
No, privately owned power suppliers alone are not sufficient. We also need deregulation. The State needs you get out of the business of generating, distributing and regulating power.
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We can go some way into more deregulation but complete deregulation is just nuts. Deregulate self-generation. But we need more regulations to force municipalities to adopt feed-in. We also need regulation to ensure the "natural monopoly" items like transmission are properly handled. Some regulation to ensure minimum baseload availability as well as grid stability.

We can't have a situation where everybody just build PV solar without batteries / pumped-storage /wind (by themselves or balanced by other providers on the grid). You also need to ensure renewables are appropriately geographically distributed to make sure we don't black out when there is a single cloudy day in the Northern Cape.

One of the problems in electricity is that your infrastructure must be over provisioned. You can't just say you have x apples that you are selling. The generation and storage must exceed demand (you need buffers). So you need to also sort out how you will pay people for having capacity available where they are not necessarily selling power generated by that capacity.

We also probably need a "auction" market where prices can be floating (within some limits) in smaller timeslots (currently we only have 4 slots). Again - this is to make sure that the market pays appropriately to drive the right mix of generation/storage/transmission.
 
noxibox said:
Reliability is not guaranteed. Private businesses seek only to make a profit. If they can do that providing an unreliable service they will. And they certainly can in the case of electricity generation.
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But generally they can't. The reliable ones will do better. If you can't generate it you can't bill for it - that is the big difference between Eskom and private.
 
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Anything privately and not state owned is the solution.
 
Yes. However, like everything profit-driven, some areas might be left unserviced if they are not profitable to the owners.
 
Surely mix and match? The fact is the real regulator of power is Eskom, which has been shown to be corrupt to the core. Fix that and then deal with private power generation. IPPs are good but need to be part of a general plan. If I have a solar panel on my roof I should be able to sell that back. I get with the idea we should break Eskom into three parts. Th problem is corruption. That is the root and cause of our power problems in this country.
 
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