Outa says it is taking the energy regulator to court over licences granted to Turkish company Karpowership. It wants to force the regulator to provide a ‘complete, unredacted record’ of its decisions to award generation licences to the company.

A Business Day report says Minister of Mineral Resources & Energy Gwede Mantashe has again started to advocate for the swift finalisation of the Karpowership deal.

At an ANC energy dialogue in Johannesburg last week and again during the past weekend’s ANC lekgotla, Mantashe said the government aimed to complete Karpowership’s outstanding regulatory requirements by the end of March.

He said his department was in talks with Karpowership to reduce its power purchase agreement for its ship-mounted gas-fired power plants to 10 years, but warned this might add to the cost per unit of power.

He said his department was ‘attending to the challenges … with the intent to resolve all outstanding issues by no later than end March 2023’.

According to Outa, the projected costs of the Karpowership projects over a 20-year period are reported to be more than R200bn, including fuel supply.

In its application filed on 23 January in the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria), Outa claims that Nersa has deliberately withheld documents related to the decision to grant licences to Karpowership, including the reasons for the decision.

‘Both Nersa and Karpowership have unequivocally indicated that they will not provide an unredacted record to Outa or even identify the information being withheld. There is also no explanation for how providing the information would prejudice Karpowership,’ says Outa legal project manager Brendan Slade.

He said the record provided to Outa is voluminous, with neither an index nor a list of the sections which were redacted. 

‘However, the financial information from the Karpowership application is missing from the documents provided.’

Full Business Day report

See also full Cape Argus report