Wind farms
Solar Farms
Wave farms
Allow private companies to create and sell energy.
This.
Currently they consist of Generation/Transmission/Distribution, which is about to be split into 3 companies if I heard correctly.
Generation:
Let private companies take charge of generation plants. They will ensure it runs effectively or they will go out of business. This includes existing plants and renewable energy farms. It will also open up the market for pricing competition.
The state shouldn't run plants with tax payer money as a slush fund.
Transmission:
Eskom should scale down to undertake the role of "grid connectivity"...which is essentially their Transmission wing.
Grid connectivity means that they can focus on connecting independent power producers all across the country to make sure they synchronize safely and that there is HV infrastructure across provinces to various HV substations.
Distribution:
Stop selling electricity to municipalities. There is no reason you should pay your municipality for electricity in the hopes that they pay the electricity supplier.
Private companies will form the most cost/time effecitive and tenderpreneurship-proof way of rolling out electricity to those who need it.
Purchasing:
Customers will then have to pay a "line rental" fee to whichever company installed/maintains the lines, but they will be allowed to buy electricity from any producer in the country.
If Sunshine-R-Us in the Northern Cape is producing massive amounts of solar power onto the grid and offer the cheapest price per kWh, you can choose to buy your electricity from them even though you are in Joburg. So you pay them for the electricity used, but you pay Joburg-Lines-R-Us (the local company) for the line rental into your house. The solarfarm supplies into the national grid - and you consume from the national grid and pay them for those units.
Bloated Staff:
Believe it or not, but not all Eskom's staff are useless. They have some exeptionally skilled technical staff. These would be most effectively used in grid monitoring and upkeep. The same could be said for some power stations, but there's no reason they can't cross over into the private sector along with the stations.
As for the admin staff, it seems as though 1 person could (and should) do the job of 4. Especially in the project and engineering environments. This is often where a massive amount of consultancy fees are used on. These departments will also be massively downscaled once the generation and distribution components are removed.
The amount of manpower used on contracts and tenders is astonishing...and almost all of it for construction of new lines etc. would become redundant if private companies start running their own distribution networks.
You also won't have a monopoly in pricing if you have more than 1 line supplier per city.
Implementation:
This is obviously the biggest issue, but in order for Eskom to try and minimize its "dept", it will have to sell off plants to private companies as well as divide its distribution lines into segments that they can auction off to companies who are interested in buying over the lines - when they buy the lines, they get to charge everyone connected to those lines for "line rental" fees, but are responsible for its maintenance.
Eskom then assumes the oversight role to ensure that compatibility and standards are maintained...until such a time where they can roll back entirely and become a governing body for the country and let the free market drive it.
But then again, this is SA so it would never work because politics.
