The combination of an increase in private sector investment in renewable energy and work by Eskom to stabilise its generation fleet and return to service units that have been on long-term outages can significantly reduce the need for load-shedding by the end of 2024.
Business leaders who serve on the national energy crisis committee (Necom), which has been put in charge of implementing the Energy Action Plan, say that while the country is likely to experience high stages of load-shedding (stages 4 to 6) for the rest of 2023, they are confident that Eskom’s generation turnaround plan will start showing real results from next year. This, together with about 4,000MW of capacity that will return to service or be commissioned at Kusile power station between September and December, will help ease load-shedding in 2024.
James Mackay, CEO of the Energy Council of SA, said the Energy Action Plan being implemented through Necom is the first “balanced plan that business and government has agreed on” and if it gets implemented as intended it provides a clear route to end load-shedding.
SA can still expect to see load-shedding at stages 4 to 6 for the rest of 2023, “but from there on we will start to see a steady improvement in load-shedding quite consistently”, he said.
“If you look at the combination of the investment appetite from the private sector for wind and solar and the more positive and stable outlook on Eskom generation, I believe we will end load-shedding sooner rather than later. By the end of next year we should be at very low levels of load-shedding if not done with it.”
Happy Khambule, environment and energy manager for Business Unity SA who also serves on Necom, has a similar view. While some of the workstreams in Necom are “not moving as fast as they should”, such as those dealing with the regulatory environment to liberalise the electricity market, “there is a lot of confidence in the Energy Action Plan”, he said.
“By December next year we should not need higher stages of load-shedding and it should be almost entirely eradicated by the end of 2025,” said Khambule.
Both Mackay and Khambule said this would depend on Eskom’s successful implementation of its generation recovery plan, which targets increasing the energy availability factor (EAF) — a measure of electricity output as a share of total installed generation capacity — of its generation fleet from where it now sits at about 55% to an average of 60% for the year to end-March 2024 and to 65% by March 2025.
Data from Eskom and the Council for Scientific Research shows that the EAF has over the past four years declined from about 65% to a low of about 56% at the end of March.
Eskom and electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa have blamed the worsening performance over the past 12 months on the failure of Kusile units 1, 2 and 3 after a chimney collapse.
Eskom data shows that even when excluding Kusile, the EAF for the coal-fired fleet has deteriorated. For the three months to August, the average EAF for all coal-fired stations excluding Kusile was about 51%, compared with 53.5% for the same period in 2022.
However, the earlier-than-planned return to service of these units, which will add about 2,400MW of generation capacity to the grid, and the return of Kusile unit 4 (with 800MW capacity) should help bump up the EAF in the next few months. Unit 4 has been on a 20-day maintenance outage since the end of August.
To reach the target of improving the generation performance on its existing fleet by about 6,000MW, Eskom also needs to see results from extensive maintenance on its older coal plants. Apart from Kusile, the other priority stations Eskom has targeted for improvements over the next two years are Duvha, Majuba, Matla, Kendal, Kriel and Arnot.
According to Mackay, the private sector and Eskom have done extensive technical reviews of four of these stations and there are interventions being implemented. These are “very clear technical interventions that will make a difference”, resulting in a more stable and reliable generation fleet.
There is “good leadership at the stations and Eskom is spending a lot of money doing the right things. When you are putting in that effort in a structured way it will show results. You can’t keep doing the right thing and not get results.”
For June, July and August, Majuba showed a slight recovery, with EAF improving by about 1 percentage point to 58% from the same period last year. Arnot and Duvha showed a good recovery, with the EAF increasing from 40% to 48% and 44% to 62%, respectively. Performance of the other priority stations deteriorated, with Tutuka’s EAF decreasing from 31% to 18%.
But Eskom head of generation Bheki Nxumalo said on Sunday that Tutuka, which has six generation units with 600MW capacity each, had only one unit running for most of July and August. During the first weeks of September, two units have been returned to service.
The outages were due to “vibrations on the turbines”.
Improvements
“If you pick up an issue on a turbine you need five days just for the turbine to cool down and another 15 days to open it, and only then can work on repairs start,” he said.
Nxumalo said they have also seen continued improvements at Arnot, where five out of six 350MW generation units were if not fully, then partially on line.
Ending load-shedding for good will also rely on adding new generation capacity.
According to Mackay there has been a “rapid acceleration of private sector appetite to invest in renewables”.
For example, the energy one-stop shop, launched in July to lessen the administrative burden and the long waiting periods for approval for new electricity generation projects, has registered and is tracking 114 projects worth 17.5GW of wind and solar capacity at various stages of development, said Mackay.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.