May 18, 2016 - South Africa will still be reliant on coal power for electricity "for years to come," Eskom group executive for distribution, Mongezi Ntsokolo said.

Ntsokolo was speaking at the African Utility Week in Cape Town on Tuesday.

Ntsokolo said that while the power utility planned on spending R580-billion on expanding electricity capacity over the next five years, the country would still be reliant on coal-fired power stations and nuclear energy for its baseload power supply for a while.

The Eskom executive then punted the case for a nuclear fleet, saying that the Koeberg nuclear power plant in Cape Town was the cheapest electricity provider of the 25 stations that Eskom operated and that it could keep going for another 30 years.

"We managed to add some 2000 MW of renewable energy to our national grid," Ntsokolo said in a Fin24 report, 'but we’ll have to use coal and nuclear for years to come."

"Nuclear energy can contribute significantly to socioeconomic growth in South Africa, plus it’s a clean energy option and a reliable source of base-load power," Ntsokolo said.  

"If we can built a nuclear fleet basis similar to that of the French, it will over the long term provide low-cost energy to South Africa."