Coal news and updates

South Africa Resurrects Plan to Sell Coal-Fired Power Plants

Key South African government ministers have reached a broad agreement to sell some of the state power utility’s coal-fired power plants to help reduce its debt burden, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana said. The accord comes two years after the plan was first raised in a National Treasury policy paper, which suggested the facilities could bring in as much as 450 billion rand ($29.5 billion). Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd.’s total debt stood at 402 billion rand at the end of March. “There’s general agreement to sell some of the coal plants,” Godongwana said in an interview in Cape Town on Thursday after presenting the medium-term budget policy statement. “Broadly we’re agreed in government on that strategy.” Eskom supplies almost all of South Africa’s electricity, most of it from coal-fired plants that make it the world’s biggest emitter of the pollutant sulfur dioxide. Disposing of the facilities will require buy-in from Eskom management, which may resist the planned sale because of the impact it would have on the 

utility’s balance sheet, Godongwana said. “They’ve got their own agenda as opposed to us,” he said. How long this will take “will depend on to what extent we’re getting resistance. But it’s not going to be open resistance. People know we can fire them so they will find silly arguments to go around the problem because if you want to do this,you can do it tomorrow.”