Say what?

Veteran energy analyst and journalist (and electrical engineer) Chris Yelland tells Peter Bruce in this illuminating edition of Podcasts From the Edge that it is going to take something special for Eskom to meet the exacting deadlines it has set itself to restore Eskom’s vanishing Energy Availability Factor. Fixing the EAF, which has fallen every year since Jacob Zuma became President, regardless of who the CEO has been, sits at the centre of plans proposed by Eskom management and now accepted and endorsed by the failing utility’s new board. But as Yelland reminds us, the EAF in any one year represents the average performance of all 90 or so of its coal fired generators. And the decline first has to be stopped before it can even remotely begin to be reversed. Effectively the board, which has just two months to find a new chief executive and then a chief operating officer a few weeks later, has made an executive decision that whoever replaces Andre de Ruyter (who leaves at the end of March) will have to accept and implement.

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