Eskom faces severe penalties

[bwana]

06/02/2007 09:20
By: Waldimar Pelser

Johannesburg - South African households had in the last year on average suffered almost 50 hours of power outages, which could lead to a severe penalty for Eskom.

Compared with this a Japanese household suffers only 12 minutes of outages a year, as is the case in Germany, hosts of last year's World Cup soccer tournament, the national energy regulator Nersa said on Monday.

Nersa's Thembasani Bukula said Eskom's high outages rate is significantly increased because rural households in the government's electricity programme are sometimes without power for days.

"But if you compare this with Japan or Germany you get the feel for the situation," he said.

Eskom is now running the risk of losing part of the R830m Nersa allowed it to spend in the last year to improve its outages rate.

Should Eskom clock more than 50 hours of blackouts per household by the end of March, "we will take this money away", said Bukula.

Unaudited figures of Eskom already show that the number of "system minutes" - a measurement of how many minutes of power the country lost last year - is so close to the allowable peak that the probability of Eskom being fined is highly likely. The system minutes are being monitored from financial year to financial year.

I've had way more than 50 hours of cuts in the last 6 months alone.

 

[Tassidar]

I love this logic:
(1) Government tells Eskom that it must not build anymore power stations
(2) Later, a government regulator fines Eskom for not having built power stations.

Am I missing something?

 

[ToxicBunny]

Tassidar : yup,

(3) Government will privatise Eskom, but then drags its feet as usual.

 

[kaspaas]

Nice one:

Lets be fair to Eskom:

The were told:

You may not build new power stations.

Now that we have a problem you will be fined because you can't build new power stations in two ticks.

 

[dlk001]

Had to cut my day short. No power in Auckland Park, Melville area.