The most pressing problem? Our existing coal generation is inefficient - i.e. our plants aren't doing what they are supposed to. We need to isolate the root causes at EACH plant and resolve them. That might be engineering, design, supply, theft, sabotage, incompetence, funding,..

...corruption, or a combination of all. Next Our transmission needs to be transformed to allow the introduction of renewable generation. That means that transmission should not be vertically integrated with generation - it's anticompetitive. That requires political will & funds.

The overarching issue to all of this is that ESkom is effectively insolvent. The debt load is so big that revenues simply won't be able to service the debt and do the necessary capital investment. This is something that the state has known for a decade or more.

Until we have accountable government, however, I'm not hopeful that any of this will be done. The ANC is a crime scene with criminal factions fighting to loot the last remaining scraps of the South African state. Those that aren't corrupt seem inept or paralysed.

This week we had the ANC complaining that Eskom was damaging their election prospects in 2024. You can't make this shit up.

We're likely going to see some more relaxation of the regulations that stop private generation and transmission and, while these things will likely lessen the impact of shortages in the short term, it won't help Eskom. It'll just add some circular momentum to the death spiral.

Privatised generation will increase supply, no doubt, but long term it is questionable whether it is ideal in a developmental state- especially if Eskom itself is privatised.

I've specifically mentioned the ANC in this thread, because their policies and internal politics have exacerbated the crisis. But I haven't seen any other political party offer a realistic coherent plan beyond changing the management, or neoliberal privatisation.

So, I'm less than hopeful that there is any other political party that could organise a genuine intervention for this problem, mainly because they consider electioneering more important that serving their community.

The worst thing that the ANC did post 1994 was to dismantle the civic organisations, maybe if they were still around there would have been more accountability.