South Africa is preparing this Christmas for an unprecedented crisis of power cuts and blackouts

MADRID, 24 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The main electricity company in South Africa, the state-owned Eskom, has alerted the population this Friday that it must be prepared to continue facing an energy crisis that has been going on for several months, although it has promised a kind of truce for the day of Christmas.

South Africa is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of power outages and blackouts thanks to a mix of multiple factors, including corruption and incompetence, but also sabotage and precarious facilities and outdated power plants still running on coal.

This is the case of the main 40-year-old nuclear power plant near Cape Town, which supplies a large part of the country. These facilities are scheduled to be dismantled next year for refurbishment work, depriving the power grid of valuable megawatts.

The company's General Director of Operations, Jan Oberholzer, has advanced that the first three months of 2023 are going to be "difficult", a period, he stressed, that "is going to be really complicated", reports the Africa News portal.

The outgoing director general of Eskom, Andre de Ruyter, who will remain in office until March after presenting his resignation a few weeks ago, has expressed himself along these lines, alleging lack of political support and corruption as the main obstacles to solving this problem. .

"Prospects for next year are very limited," as the country would need between 4,000 and 6,000 megawatts of additional capacity for the network, De Ruyter explained.

For its part, the Government has reported that cases of sabotage are taking place as a result of the prevailing fraud and corruption, for which reason it announced last week the deployment of small battalions of soldiers to protect four power plants and expel the Criminal organizations.