“The total volume of electricity imported from outside South African borders increased from 9,782 Gigawatt-hours in 2006 to 11,318 Gigawatt-hours in 2007, which represents an increase of 15.7%,” Statistics South Africa said Thursday.
In its report entitled “Electricity generated and available for distribution”, the organisation collated the entire previous year's figures, thus providing a comparison to 2006 trends.
This comes as the country faces an electricity crisis, with the nation's main power utility Eskom implementing load shedding to balance supply and demand for power.
It has been speculated that South Africa exports power to its neighbouring states and does not import it, a perception that Eskom has been at pains to rectify.
The power producer is hurrying to boost its supply capacity to cope with the country's growing hunger for electricity and has embarked various interventions to ease shortages.
The figures do reflect these efforts and the report indicates that Eskom has been increasing its production of power in the country.
Stats SA reports that that the estimated production of electricity during 2007 increased by 3.8% (9,681 Gigawatt-hours) compared with 2006.
“Similarly electricity production by Eskom increased by 3.8% (9,344 Gigawatt-hours) during this period. The estimated production of electricity for the fourth quarter of 2007 increased by 2.9% (1,873 Gigawatt-hours) compared with the fourth quarter of 2006,” reads the report.
Consumption of electricity also grew, but at a much slower pace than production.
The estimated consumption of electricity in December 2007 increased by 1.4% compared with the same month the previous year.
Government has called on all citizens, businesses and other organisations to come together and work towards finding solutions to the current power crisis.
While the proportion of electricity distributed to the provinces remained fairly stable over the past two years, Eskom reported higher distribution during 2007 than during 2006 to all provinces except KwaZulu-Natal.
The largest percentage increases in electricity distribution were reported for the Eastern Cape with 18.2%, North West 8.6%, Mpumalanga 7.4% and Gauteng with 3.8%.
One Gigawatt-hour of electricity is equal to one million kilowatt-hours. A kilowatt hour is the basic unit of electrical energy equal to one kilowatt of power supplied to, or taken from an electric circuit steadily for one hour.
Article published courtesy of BuaNews
