BY MBONO MDLULI
MBABANE – Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC) has identified a coal mining company to help produce electricity locally.
This is done to enhance the local production of electricity, which might also help in managing the costs of electricity to the customers, which seems to be growing every year. This was said by EEC Managing Director (MD) Ernest Mkhonta during an interview on Eswatini TV’s Asakhe Kwetfu programme.
Mkhonta did not say the name of the company. He said the EEC was now in the process of drawing contracts with the company and finding out how the coal was going to be extracted to start producing the electricity. Mkhonta said the drawing of the contracts came as a result of an expression of interests they did in July this year, where they called upon companies to submit proposals to EEC and state how they could help in extracting minerals such as coal to produce electricity, which would later be sold to the company, in order for it to sell it to the end consumer.
The MD was responding to a question posed by Eswatini TV Chief Editor John Molelekeng on what was EEC doing to enhance adequate production of electricity within Eswatini. This is one major question that is being asked by EEC customers during the ongoing stakeholder engagement led by Eswatini Energy Regulatory Authority (ESERA). The engagement is to find out if customers are ready to pay 25 percent more on the current price of electricity.
The question of electricity production was asked because Mkhonta highlighted that 60 percent of EEC’s operation costs went to the importation of electricity. He said operational costs accounted for the remaining 40 percent. He also made this clarification because some of the customers felt that electricity was expensive because some of the materials used by EEC in its work were expensive. They made an example of cars used by the company, stating that some of these cars were Toyota GD6 models. Some even went as far as stating that EEC was probably the only company with many general managers in the country.
Mkhonta said they had long identified that the major problem was the importation of electricity by EEC, which was main cost driver at EEC. At the moment, electricity is bought from South Africa’s power producer Eskom, with some of the being bought from Mozambique’s power producer, known as Electricidade de Moçambique. About 80 percent of the country’s electricity was bought from outside. According to Mkhonta, Eskom was the only cheaper seller to Eswatini at the moment. Other alternatives for importing electricity were more expensive than Eskom.
The MD said buying electricity from Mozambique was expensive because it was done in US dollars. He further mentioned that EEC used to buy from the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). However, that market was not reliable because the countries forming the SAPP did not have abundant electricity. According to Mkhonta, by 2014, they had already looking for ways to produce electricity locally, but the companies they partnered with made expensive proposals, which could result in a more volatile situation that it was already. He further mentioned that if they were not going to get what they asked for as EEC, this could compromise the quality of electricity being produced by the company. This means Emaswati would start expecting things like load shedding.
