Abstracts

3 in a Reformed Electricity Supply Industry (2019) . Although the plan is a step in the right direction, the government has notably vowed to keep all the newly unbundled entities under state ownership. The Roadmap forgoes the opportunity to strongly address the lack of competition in electricity generation and fails to fully embrace the promise of renewable generation. In this article I briefly deal with the long history of South Africa’s electricity sector. I contrast recent government policy with independent expert opinion on how Eskom can be restructured to resolve its debt burden and the electricity sector transformed to embrace competitive and renewable generation. Lastly, I address the most critical challenge to broadly transforming the electricity sector: protecting the livelihoods of communities that have historically supported coal mines and coal- fired power stations. Becoming Eskom It will be our endeavor…as pioneers to foresee the needs of a country fast developing, and by wise anticipation be ever ready to provide power without profit, wherever it may be required. —Dr. Hendrik Johannes van der Bijl, Founding Chairman, Eskom, n.d. A Century of Progress The century-long history of South Africa’s electricity sector sheds light on how it came to be dominated by Eskom and why it faces immense challenges today. Electrification efforts in South Africa were initially related to telegraphy and street-lighting. The discovery of gold in Witwatersrand in 1886 led to greater demand for electricity as mining companies sought to illuminate mines and power small machinery. The strong bond between mines and the electricity sector in South Africa still exists. Although mines initially had their own generation plants, it soon became clear that a centralized electricity project would supply power more adequately and cheaply, which led to the formation of the Victoria Falls Power Company Limited (VFP) in 1906. Owners of this independent but inaptly named endeavor abandoned original plans to harness the power of the distant Victoria Falls and opted to use coal deposits in the northerly Transvaal region of South Africa. To this day, South Africa relies heavily on coal-fired power stations for generation (Table 1) (Eskom, n.d.). In 1909, four colonies that make up the modern-day Republic of South Africa established the Union of South Africa. The statement above, by the founding chairman of Eskom, Dr. Hendrik Johannes van der Bijl, exemplified the government’s view of the provision of electricity as a public service; the government passed the Power Act of 1910 to nationalize VFP and later established Eskom in 1922. In the following decades, Eskom electrified railways throughout South Africa, established power stations to supply growing mining activities, and acquired all the remaining private entities in the electricity sector. It utilized advancements in transmission technology in the 1960s to establish an interconnected network to pool all the power stations into one central grid, which effectively improved economies of scale, enhanced reliability, and helped lower electricity prices. The utility became more critical to the economy and ramped up coal-fired generation in the 1970s and 1980s to meet energy demand that could no longer be fulfilled by oil and gas imports, which were limited by increasing international antiapartheid pressure on South Africa at the time (Eskom, n.d.). After the end of apartheid in 1994, Eskom grew even larger as it embarked on an aggressive electrification campaign. It sought to directly service the black townships and rural households previously neglected under apartheid. In 1995 alone, Eskom connected more than 300,000 households—equivalent to a thousand per business day. By the turn of the century, Eskom was known as a model utility; it was recognized as a leading power company at the Global Energy Awards in 2001 for providing the world’s lowest-cost electricity, increasing transmission system reliability, and developing superior methods for combustion of low-grade coal (Du Toit, 2019). Rapid Decline Less than a decade after receiving the