Eskom’s big 14,000km transmission headache

Eskom only completed three of the five transmission line expansion projects it had planned for the 2023/24 financial year, achieving just 74.4km of the 166km expansion it had in its pipeline for the year.

Energy analyst Chris Yelland says “massive” challenges are ahead for Eskom Transmission and the National Transmission Company of South Africa (NTCSA).

He said Eskom’s target for the financial year was 166km of transmission lines across five projects, including 126km of 400kV and 40km of 132kV lines.

However, it only completed 74.4km across three 400kV projects, and the transmission networks are yet to be energised. “88.6 km was not achieved for various reasons,” he added.

For reference, Eskom’s Transmission Development Plan aims to build 14,000km of 132kV, 275kV, 400kV, and 765kV transmission lines in ten years.

The 74.4km it completed in 2023/24 represents just 5.3% of the 1,400km it will need to build each year to achieve the goal.

Expanding Eskom’s transmission network is critical to ensuring South Africa’s future power grid stability.

In July 2023, electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa revealed South Africa’s plans to expand the country’s transmission network by more than 14,000km and increase transformers sixfold by 2033.

“That amounts to a 600% increase in transmission infrastructure over the next ten years,” the minister said.

Two months before Ramokgopa’s announcement, Intellidex managing director for capital markets Peter Attard Montalto told MyBroadband that Eskom’s transmission grids in several provinces were full or close to it.

This meant that, even if the government signed and brought independent power producer (IPP) projects planned for provinces like the Northern, Western, and Eastern Cape, it wouldn’t be possible to distribute the generated energy to other parts of the country.

Montalto also said Eskom was only spending less than R1 billion of the R14.5 billion it needs to spend each year on upgrading the transmission grid.

In December 2022, he revealed that the failure to allocate 3.2GW of wind power through IPP bid window six was the result of a lack of transmission grid capacity.

Montalto said it was critical that South Africa expand its transmission grid. Despite Eskom and the private sector urging the government to do so, this has never been done.

As a result, the transmission grid in the Northern Cape was at capacity in December 2022, with the Greater Cape region as a whole nearing capacity at the time.

“The Greater Cape area is close to full capacity; in particular, the Northern Cape has run out of capacity, the Eastern Cape has about 1.6 GW of capacity, excluding applications (for connection) which are currently being processed, and the Western Cape also has about 1.8 GW excluding applications,” Eskom told MyBroadband.

Chris Yelland, managing director at EE Business Intelligence

NTSCA to inherit Eskom’s transmission headache

Ramokgopa’s announcement about expanding the transmission grid by 14,000km by 2033 came after the NTCSA received its first licence from the National Energy Regulator of South Africa.

The licensing allowed it to become the system operator for the national grid and represented another step forward in Eskom’s unbundling.

Eskom announced the appointment of the NTCSA’s board of directors in January 2024, marking another key milestone of the power utility’s legal separation into three entities.

The Eskom board appointed twelve non-executive directors to the NTCSA’s board, including several energy experts and business executives.

In March 2024, Nersa consented to the transfer of Eskom’s powers and duties related to section 34 Power Purchase Agreements with IPPs to the NTCSA.

It also sanctioned issuing a cost recovery letter to the NTSCA for such IPP projects to designate the NTSCA as the buyer in terms of the Energy Regulation Act.

“The transition of the Buyer role for section 34 IPPs from Eskom to the NTCSA is a critical component of this process,” it said.

It added that Eskom’s application for consent to transfer its power and duties, submitted in December 2023, was a pivotal step in the unbundling process.

Eskom’s unbundling aims to make the power utility more manageable and encourage more private-sector participation in electricity production. It could also allow IPPs to compete directly with Eskom’s generation division.