Sustained improvement in the performance of power plants has resulted in Eskom reducing its spending on diesel to run peaking stations by about 78%.
During April and May, the first two months of its current financial year, Eskom spent about R5.6bn less on diesel to run open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs) than over the same period last year, with total spending down from R7.8bn to R2.2bn.
Eskom spent more than R30bn on diesel to power the OCGTs in the financial year to end-March 2024, up from R21bn in the previous year and about R10bn in 2022.
This “significant” reduction in diesel costs was made possible by the consistent improvement in generation performance, said Eskom group CEO Dan Marokane.
He addressed the media on Friday to share the progress during his first 100 days in office.
Generation performance has shown “a step change”, said Marokane.
Eskom has not implemented load-shedding for 79 days. This was partly possible because of a marked reduction in the generation capacity that had to be taken offline because of unit breakdowns at power stations.
After seeing breakdowns result in as much as 19,000MW of generation capacity being offline at times in 2023, breakdowns have reduced to less than 12,000MW on average over the last two months.
“To have a comfortable winter with reduced intensity and frequency of load-shedding we had to keep [breakdowns] below 14,000MW. For the last two months, we have averaged 12,000MW. Our generation recovery plan still has some way to go as we focus on improving the unreliability of the fleet, but we are comforted by the results we are seeing to date,” Marokane said.
Notwithstanding the recent improvement in power station performance, Marokane said load-shedding remained a risk.
“We are not yet at the point where we can comfortably say that load-shedding is behind us.”
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