Almost 10% of 2020 was consumed by load-shedding, a statistical report by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has shown.
In its annual “Statistics on Power Generation in South Africa” report, released on Friday, the CSIR said SA endured 859 hours of load-shedding in 2020 — about 9.8% of the total 8,760 hours in a year.
The unprecedented intensity of load-shedding in SA was despite months of suppressed power demand last year amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the hard lockdown.
As power cuts persist in 2021, it has been flagged as posing the greatest risk to SA’s fragile economic recovery.
On Sunday, Eskom announced that stage 2 load-shedding, which cuts 2000MW of demand off the grid and that has been implemented since Wednesday last week, would continue into Wednesday this week.
The CSIR found there had been intensive load-shedding before the Covid-19 related lockdown was implemented at end-March. In fact, 63% of 2020 load-shedding occurred during this time.
The availability of Eskom’s fleet of power stations is on a declining trend and drove load-shedding events in 2020, the council said.
As measured by an energy availability factor (EAF) Eskom fleet availability of 65% was lower than the 66.9% in 2019 and 71.9% in 2018. The best hourly EAF of 78.8% was achieved on June 10 2020 and the worst of 51.7% on December 31 2020, the report noted.
The CSIR said that over the past decade the SA system demand has dropped 7.8%, mostly seen in 2020. System demand reduced 0.8% per year over the past decade. If 2020 is stripped out, demand has been declining 0.4% per year.
SA’s electricity mix remains dominated by coal-fired power generation, which contributed 83.5% to system demand in 2020, the CSIR said.
Coal energy contributed 83.5%; renewable energy 10.5%, variable renewable energy 5.6%, nuclear energy 5.2% and the remaining 0.9% came from diesel. The council said 2020 was the first year that variable renewable energy — which refers to solar PV, wind and concentrated solar power (CSP) — surpassed the contribution from nuclear energy in SA.
The CSIR said new insights have been made possible by a recently established Eskom data portal in the interests of power system data transparency.
Eskom said on Sunday its teams have successfully returned a generation unit each at the Matimba and Medupi power stations, but at the weekend suffered further breakdowns at five power stations.
About 6,500MW is offline for planned maintenance, while 12,900MW of added capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns and delays, the utility said in a statement on Sunday.
Eskom said it continues to implement reliability maintenance and “as such the system will continue to be constrained, with the possibility of load-shedding remaining elevated”.
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