Zuko Komisa

The City of Tshwane has announced its Energy Master Plan.
Point of View with Phemelo Motene spoke to Tshwane Mayor Cilliers Brink about the city’s energy master plan which seeks to reduce the city’s dependence on Eskom and to alleviate the burden of load shedding
Listen to the full conversation here:
The mayor of Tshwane, Cilliers Brink, unveiled plans on Monday for the city to start producing its own electricity through a private-public partnership plan to start up the Rooiwal and Pretoria West power plants.
“We want to save the city a couple of stages of load shedding”
According to Brink, Tshwane’s energy master plan aims to lessen load shedding and the City’s reliance on Eskom.
He also added the plan is not to take over the running of the power stations but to use the infrastructure to generate energy supply.
“The idea is that we are not going to become independent of Eskom in the next 3 years, but if we can through a combination of our own energy generation and procurement we can get 1,000 megawatts or the 600 megawatts that we use as a city that will potentially save the city a couple of stages of load shedding,” said Brink
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Eskom is affecting the city’s bottom line
“The point we are making is that the situation we have with Eskom is affecting us financially, it’s affecting the economy of the city, it is affecting the capacity of our distribution network. If we don’t start with that and combine it with other efforts, we are going to lose our competitive advantage, and more and more people are going to go to places that are solving load-shedding issues,” said Brink
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