Business needs power certainty: SACCI

Certainty over power supply is key to ensuring South Africa achieves optimal economic activity, the SA Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Sacci) said on Monday (03/11/2014).

"South Africa is now emerging from significant economic pressures following the protracted industrial action in the mining and manufacturing sectors," Sacci CEO Neren Rau said in a statement.

Businesses in those sectors needed to use the remainder of the year to recoup lost production.

"In the retail sector and in the tourism sector, the majority of businesses depend on festive season sales to tide them over during slower periods in the first quarter of the year," he said.

Businesses thus needed certainty about power outages, so they could plan around them. He said the success of a response to the current power crisis depended on transparency in the relationship between Eskom and its users.

A coal storage silo at the Majuba power station in Mpumalanga cracked on Saturday and later collapsed, damaging a conveyor system which takes coal into the station, Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger said.

The power station's capacity was reduced from 3600MW to 1800MW, and later to 600MW.

On Sunday, alternative measures were put in place to deliver the coal in the power station. Etzinger could not immediately say how much these measures would cost.

He confirmed earlier that there would be no power cuts in the country on Monday.

Coal supplies had been restored to two of the six units at the power station. This meant one third of the power station's normal capacity was back in service. - Sapa