It was “inevitable” that South Africa would have to use powerships to help deal with the country’s power supply crisis, Electricity Minister (in the Presidency) Kgosientsho Ramokgopa told delegates in his closing keynote address at the Enlit Africa conference in Cape Town in Thursday afternoon. Loadshedding – scheduled rotating power cuts imposed by State-owned national electricity utility Eskom – was, he said, “the single most important challenge facing us”. Powerships are basically power stations mounted on the hulls of ships, which can be sailed around the world to where they are needed, securely moored, linked to the local grid, generate power and feed it into that grid. He stressed that he was not referring to a specific company that operated such vessels but to the option that powerships provided.
