new delhi, Oct. 12 -- State-run NTPC Ltd is in talks with South Africa's Eskom for a collaboration in green energy, with the two sides working on the modalities of a possible partnership, including a joint venture (JV). The partnership could deepen NTPC's presence in Africa's largest power market, South Africa's high commissioner to India Anil Sooklal said, while helping the coal-dependent nation expand clean energy generation and keep its ageing thermal plants running through the supply of components. NTPC and Eskom are the largest power producers in their respective countries. State-owned Eskom contributes 90% to South Africa's overall power generation, Sooklal said in an interview. "We're only now going out into public-private partnerships," Sooklal said. "They're (NTPC and Eskom) exploring how they can work together in terms of our green energy feed into the grid." NTPC is already training Eskom's engineers, while the two energy majors explore possible partnership models in the green energy space as South Africa turns to green energy to meet its growing demand. South Africa has about 19GW of green power capacity, with plans to increase it to 26GW by 2030 and 105GW by 2035. South Africa has historically faced a power crunch. Its severe power shortage subjected the country to rolling blackouts of 2 to over 10 hours a day, peaking significantly in 2022 and 2023 with record numbers of blackout days. In 2023, a total of 91 days of outages were witnessed. The situation has improved. On 4 October, Eskom announced that South Africa had not experienced load-shedding in over 500 days, reflecting the cumulative impact of improved fleet performance, lower unplanned outages and increased generation capacity. The high commissioner acknowledged NTPC's contribution in the matter. "Our energy crisis is over; we don't have power outages anymore. And interestingly, NTPC has been part of the story," Sooklal said. "Eskom, our state energy provider, and NTPC signed an MoU about a year and a half ago," he said. Under this agreement, NTPC trains engineers of Eskom in an in-house three-month training programme in India. Queries emailed to NTPC and Eskom on their green energy collaboration remained unanswered. At the group level, NTPC has a total installed power generation capacity of 91.5GW in India, including 67.36GW of coal-based, 6.51GW gas-based and the remaining 17.60GW of renewable energy. The company has also forayed into nuclear power generation and is aiming for 30GW capacity by 2047, nearly a third of the country's overall 100GW target. South Africa, the largest economy in the continent with a gross domestic product (GDP) of about $480 billion, witnesses the highest power demand in the region....