Eskom has warned that more “high-level” load-shedding is expected for the week ahead, though it hopes to add about 1,000MW to the grid within the next couple of weeks by buying energy from companies that have excess private generation capacity.
A week of escalating power station breakdowns led to Eskom having to urgently resort to stage 6 load-shedding on Sunday morning for the second time in 2022. The 1,000MW is equivalent to two stages of load-shedding.
Eskom CEO André de Ruyter told journalists on Sunday the utility would approach the market on Monday morning to procure “whatever megawatts are available”, with a minimum 1,000MW the target.
He said he had confirmed these plans with public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan at the weekend. They agreed that the procurement process should go ahead immediately and that consultation with the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa) would follow to determine how the costs would be recouped.
“We are looking at [purchasing power at] prices we will be able to obtain on the market that will be competitive with the highest-cost alternative, which is the power produced with the [diesel-powered] open-cycle gas turbines,” De Ruyter said.
These emergency generation units are more expensive to run than the coal-fired plants, partly because of the high cost of diesel.
Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer said the utility has spent more than R7.7bn on diesel this financial year (since April) and has a remaining budget for the year to March of only about R500m.
Some of the companies Eskom may approach to purchase electricity from are “large industrial users with large capacity”, such as chemicals business Sasol and pulp and paper company Sappi, De Ruyter said.
“The timeline for this is probably a week or two, depending on how quickly we can sort out the commercial [agreements].”
De Ruyter emphasised that the 1,000MW Eskom wants to source from Monday onwards will be existing generation capacity, which means it will be immediately available to add to the grid.
Sappi already supplies Eskom with energy from its 25MW Ngodwana biomass power plant, and about 10MW of surplus energy from its Ngodwana mill.
Sappi corporate affairs head André Oberholzer told Business Day the company would “be happy to talk with Eskom to see what solutions might be available”. However, he said as things stand, Sappi does not have any other big source of surplus energy that can easily be made available to Eskom, over and above what it already supplies to the utility.
Eskom’s Oberholzer said it was difficult to provide an outlook for load-shedding for the coming week, but it was likely that stage 6 would continue on Monday and “high stages for the rest of the week”.
Breakdowns
On Sunday about half of Eskom’s generation capacity was offline, with 15,600MW lost due to breakdowns and 7,000MW offline for planned maintenance.
Eskom planned to restore about 2,000MW to the grid on Sunday and about 3,000MW on Monday, but De Ruyter warned this was unlikely to be smooth sailing, as “there are often repeat trips”.
For this reason, and as Eskom works to replenish low reserves at the emergency pumped storage and diesel-powered stations (which together can generate about 6,000MW), there is a high risk that load-shedding will continue for much of the coming week.
Vally Padayachee, special adviser to the Association of Municipal Electricity Utilities, said the municipalities and metros it represents are frustrated at the increased stages of load-shedding implemented at short notice by Eskom.
Longer periods of load-shedding increase the damage caused to municipal grid infrastructure and lead to higher levels of theft and vandalism.
Padayachee, a former executive manager for generation at Eskom and former COO of City Power in Johannesburg, told Business Day higher stages of load-shedding, especially above stage 4, put operational pressure on municipalities, often worsened by the limited availability of skilled operating staff.
He said at some municipalities it was not possible to implement load-shedding remotely and staff had to go out to turn off switches at substations.
“Up to stage 4 this is generally manageable, but when we go beyond this stage it sometimes becomes physically impossible to implement [the load-shedding schedule] when you have only one or two of these highly skilled staff around at a time,” he said.
Public hearings
Adding to the frustration is the possibility of a large electricity tariff increase at a time when customers felt they were simply not getting value for their money, Padayachee said.
This week Nersa will hold a series of public hearings into Eskom’s tariff application for 2023/2024 and 2024/2025.
The utility was granted a 9.6% general tariff increase that was implemented in April, though this was less than half of what it applied for. For next year and 2024, Eskom is asking the regulator to approve hikes of 32% and about 9%, respectively.
Update: September 18 2022
This article has been updated with new information.
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