The electricity war room, which was set up in December to address South Africa’s energy challenges is making strides.

This is according to Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown. Briefing journalists in Cape Town on Wednesday, the Minister apologised to the public for the inconvenience caused by load shedding and pointed out some of the success of the electricity war room.

Some of the war room’s achievements include the following points, among others:

• Medupi Power Station reaching its milestone by delivering power to the grid on 2 March 2015 from its unit six generator. Once on-line, the unit will bring 800 Megawatts to the grid
• Restoring the Majuba Power Station is underway and 1 200 Megawatts has been recovered as part of the solution
• Eskom’s maintenance strategy and its execution is receiving focused attention from the war room to ensure that it delivers improvements required in plant availability and performance. Thirty experienced senior managers have been deployed to power stations in this regard
• A R4 billion loan was recently secured to scale up Eskom’s renewable energy generation capacity. Eskom will build the Kiwano Solar thermal power station in the Northern Cape and the Ingula Pumped Storage Scheme in KwaZulu-Natal which will add 100 megawatts and 1 332 megawatts respectively to the national grid
• The completion of the Sere Wind Farm in Vredendal in the Western Cape and KaXu Solar One Power Plant in Pofadder in the Northern Cape have together added 200 megawatts to the national grid and
• The co-generation contracts were successfully renewed at the end of March, ensuring 800 megawatts to the grid.