The “cluster” of power station breakdowns that resulted in stage 6 load-shedding being implemented for the first time this year on Saturday has begun to be resolved.
As more generating units return to service there should be some relief from higher stages of load-shedding by Wednesday.
This is according to electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, who addressed the media on Sunday to explain why electricity supply deteriorated as rapidly as did from Thursday to Saturday.
Over the course of four days last week about 4,400MW of generation capacity was lost (about equivalent to four stages of load-shedding) after the breakdown of nine generating units across several stations due to boiler tube leaks. This contributed to the rise in load-shedding stages from Thursday night until Saturday, when Eskom was forced to implement stage 6 power cuts, leaving many people without power for 12 hours a day.
By Sunday, two units with combined generation capacity of 1,000MW had returned to service. The other units are expected to be fixed over the next three days, said Ramokgopa.
This should cause load-shedding to return to lower stages by Wednesday, he said. On Sunday afternoon, Eskom reduced load-shedding to stage 5.
On Sunday about 17,600MW of generation capacity was still unavailable due to unplanned outages. This is more or less in line with the average unplanned outages in May last yea, which the national energy crisis committee uses as a baseline to measure improvement in Eskom’s generation performance.
The monthly average unplanned outages in December and January were 13,400MW and 14,300MW, respectively.
Apart from the high number of breakdowns, the megawatts that are unavailable due to planned maintenance also contributed to the need for higher stages of load-shedding, Ramokgopa said.
In December and January about 8,000MW of capacity was offline for planned maintenance, against about 3,000MW-4,800MW in the six preceding months.
Accepted risk
“We acknowledge there is inherent risk in the approach we are taking to ramp up planned maintenance. This means there is less of a buffer and should multiple generation units fail at the same [as happened last week] all you can do is increase load-shedding,” he said.
But, said Ramokgopa, Eskom and government have accepted this risk because of the urgent need to intensify maintenance on the coal-fired power stations that are performing at historically low levels.
He said that because of fiscal support Eskom received from Treasury in the form of a three-year, R254bn debt-relief package, Eskom “has to do the right thing and invest in units to improve their health” so that they can perform better and more reliably when they are returned to service.
“We have taken this risk in an effort to ultimately resolve load-shedding, and we have no intention to issue instructions to the Eskom board to deviate from this strategy.”
Higher stages of load-shedding are “the price we pay for doing things the right way”.
“There will be setbacks. From Friday to today [Sunday] we have experienced this, but these setbacks will become smaller and the intensity of load-shedding will reduce,” said Ramokgopa.
So far in February, there has been no improvement in Eskom’s generation performance compared with that of February last year.
The energy availability factor (EAF), which measures available generation capacity as a share of total installed capacity, for February 2023 was 52.7%. For the first 10 days of February 2024 the EAF was 52.3%
Eskom has set a goal of achieving an average EAF across its generation fleet of 60% for the 2023/24 financial year to end-March. As part of this goal, the utility wants to achieve an EAF of 65% in March.
Eskom’s head of generation, Bheki Nxumalo, said on Sunday they remain committed to achieving a 65% EAF in March.
Information published on Eskom’s data portal shows that the EAF has remained consistently below 58% from March to January.
After the announcement by Eskom that it had to increase load-shedding to stage 6, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said on the social media network X that this was a clear sign of sabotage.
Commenting on this statement, Ramokgopa said it is impossible to confirm at present whether sabotage played a role in any of last week's unit failures.
Most Eskom employees are “competent and committed”, but they cannot discount that there might be “elements trying to undermine what we are trying to do”.
“There are one or two incidents that are being investigated to determine if any sabotage was involved in causing the breakdown of units,” said Ramokgopa.
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