Eskom CEO Dan Marokane has outlined the case for why the State-owned utility will be entering the renewable-energy space more assertively over the coming months and years, as well as how the group intends implementing this strategy.

The why, he insists, is not to “crowd out” competitors or to regain lost monopoly power.

Instead, he outlined the following two objectives.

Firstly, to help its generation business, which is meant to eventually be fully separated from the wires units of transmission and distribution, safeguard a role in a future electricity system that will be far less reliant on coal, the business’s current bread and butter.

And secondly, to provide opportunities in the electricity sector for workers and communities that will become vulnerable as the system shifts away from coal.

“We have a 42 000-person workforce that needs to be transitioned.

“It’s our responsibility to ensure that when we transition, we are actually transitioning our workers,” Marokane has explained.

Eskom’s renewables strategy has, thus, been linked directly with the country’s unfolding Just Energy Transition – an approach that is designed to support the shift to renewables, while also creating direct and indirect economic opportunities in coal regions as plants are retired and mines closed.

The how, meanwhile, is also starting to emerge, with Eskom having issued a tender seeking private partners with proven renewables credentials to help it establish a new and separate ‘Renewable Energy Business’; one that is said to have a pipeline of 2 GW of near-term opportunities.

“We will do this with others on our land, with our people, who are skilled, and we will also leverage the balance sheet of others to derisk ourselves going forward.

“So, we’ve entered an era of partnership, and it’s a space that Eskom has to play in,” Marokane said, rebuffing those who have raised questions about Eskom’s motives as well as its agility to compete with independent power producers.

Directionally, this move towards renewables, and the rationale as presented, appears progressive.

For one, it’s important that such a coal-dominant entity is embracing technologies that it could otherwise have been opposing.

It also shows that the leadership is seeing through the fog that has enveloped the energy transition in light of the regressive steps being taken in the US, where policy interventions are being made to throw sand into the gears of the green transition.

While the economics of wind and solar PV will eventually blow or burn away the haze, immediate visibility is clouded, which is likely to slow deployments.

Should the investments be timed to match the turn-down of coal units and to absorb surplus grid capacity that arises, it also makes sense, particularly if Eskom workers are employed in the process.

That said, it should not become a green fig leaf to hide Eskom’s structural and environmental problems that can only be solved through ongoing restructuring, massive grid investment, coal decommissioning and acceleration in non-Eskom generation build programmes.