City Power is making strides to attract investors and transform itself into a trading business, a step away from its traditional model, of buying electricity from Eskom and reselling to residents and business.
Bonolo Ramokhei, Board Chairperson of City Power, says “if we don’t take drastic
measures to be able to deal with investment, we will wake up one day in crisis.”
He was interviewed by moderator of a session, Tokologo Phetla, CEO of Commodore Industries SA, at the recently held Solar & Future Storage Energy Show, organized by Terrapinn.
Ramokhei said City Power needs at least R50 billion, to mend the network needed to
catch up on infrastructure to supply residents of Johannesburg. He said it will take about 50 years to catch up.
“Government alone, will not be able to fix the quagmire, how do you say to investors,
pension funds, development partners, here is our network, it actually generates money, if we were an equivalent of a state utility, we’d be larger than the utility of Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho. We are an entity that matters.”
The traditional model the Joburg-based power utility was founded on, was that of buying from the State and reselling to residents and business, which worked on assumptions that there was always going to be reliable Eskom supply, and that electricity would be cheap.
Now with both assumptions out the window, Eskom prices have shot through the roof, way above inflation, and unreliable leading to loadshedding, where does that leave City Power, residents of Joburg and business?
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