As the May 29 election approaches Eskom, the national electricity utility, appears to be going on what looks like a determined drive to be as cheerful as possible as often as possible. Twice in as many weeks it has claimed to have definitively turned the corner and that its energy availability factor (EAF, the percentage of generating capacity actually generating) has turned positive.
That this is just not in the least bit true seems not to bother Eskom at all. It reported on February 22 that “year-on-year from January 2023 to January 2024, the year-to-date EAF shows a positive trend, moving from 50% to 55% an increase of 5%”.
As I wrote here last week, at no stage do Eskom’s weekly systems status reports contain such figures. They appear to have been sucked from the thumb by whoever writes these statements, a politician or one of the board who promised back in December 2022 to turn the EAF around.
Who but a politician would unthinkingly assume a move from 50% to 55% is a 5% increase anyway? It’s a 10% move, and at 10%, for Eskom’s EAF, so dramatically “positive” it would have been shouted from the rooftops had it been even remotely accurate.
Despite my helpful observations here last week, Eskom remains on Cloud 9, reporting last week that “our objective remains to achieve an average (EAF) of 65% in the month of March 2024 (that’s now) and an average of 70% in the month of March 2025”.
Those are old targets, probably unreachable. But while the election’s on so, it seems, are the targets. At the beginning of 2023, parliament’s standing committee took a brief from the still relatively new Eskom board and later reported that “on 25 July 2022 the president set out five priorities to turn Eskom and the electricity supply chain around. Central to those key priorities was the improvement of energy availability.
“The board’s approach had always been based on how to fix the system challenges in the fleet that was available at Eskom, while simultaneously adding megawatts into the grid. If the country could find ways to add megawatts into the grid with speed, this would create space for the technical teams at Eskom to fix the machines, but if the machines were constantly overworked without the reprieve of being relieved by new megawatts added to the transmission lines, the current problems would persist.
“The announced two-year plan would see Eskom move the current EAF to the upper 59% and 60% by 31 March 2023, and by 31 March 2024 it would be ramped up to 65%. The final milestone of the turnaround strategy would be on 31 March 2025, when the EAF would have reached 70%.”
We know no megawatts have been added to the grid, and we know Eskom never made the March ’23 target, but we are still apparently reaching for the ’24 one. Why? Surely the whole point of the mature new approach to maintenance at Eskom is that you do it properly and don’t stress your plant? Politics must be the push factor here.
Getting from the EAF of 54.04% at Eskom for the week ended March 3 (and a Jan 1 to March 3 average of 51.75% for the year to date) to an average of 65% for the whole month is beyond impossible, and yet here’s Eskom inviting scepticism and mockery by pretending to be going for it. What is wrong with these people?
There was a neat turn in the most recent Eskom statement. Where the standing committee on public accounts heard that the 65% target would be achieved “by” March 31 this year, the new statement targets an “average of 65% in the month of March 2024” – in other words not a rolling improvement but (what would be) a sudden, beyond remarkable, hoik in the EAF for a month.
Interestingly, the Eskom statement containing these wild promises was intended to welcome the final publication by the National Treasury of the German VGBe power consortium’s Eskom investigation conducted more than three months last year. The Germans said Eskom was badly managed and overcentralised, and its station managers were disempowered.
The Germans implied that maintenance at the big coal plants was poor and that the plants, even those running, often operated below capacity because of minor faults not being attended to. Much to the delight of coal supporters, the VGBe report suggests that even older Eskom plant could operate at EAFs of more than 80% were it properly maintained. They suggested that perhaps, should their report be adopted, small foreign teams should stay on at each coal plant to oversee maintenance.
For the most part, probably because Eskom and government read the report months before it was released, both implied in the past week that the main VGBe proposals are, in fact, being implemented and that it was all part of the Eskom plan anyway. Indeed, planned outages of plant rose sharply in December and January and, despite the poor performance at an Eskom EAF level, load-shedding is far less intense.
A poor Eskom EAF and higher planned maintenance and less intense load-shedding can only be explained by an increased contribution from renewable sources in the private sector, but no-one is calling that either. Now is not the time.
What is really worrying though is that while the Germans insist that when a plant breaks it should be repaired back to its original condition (the way they do things at home) it’s unlikely we are doing that much here. Even the relatively high levels of planned outage do not last that long.
The SA way, the ANC way, is to patch the hole and push on. It’s a lesson learned from the Cubans, who we employ to keep our military moving. But finance minister Enoch Godongwana made his enormous R254bn Eskom debt relief package last year dependent on Eskom following the German report to the letter. Now may be the time to stand up and see that it does.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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.