June sparked hope that Eskom was ever so slowly approaching some semblance of real recovery. The early winter brought only a slight chill, power demand never reached the feared maximum highs of 34,000MW and Eskom broke through the “psychological barrier” of reducing generation unit breakdowns to below 14,000MW after highs of more than 21,000MW earlier in 2023.
South Africans were treated to consecutive days of limited power cuts and even some load-shedding-free periods during the day. This was achieved with little use of the diesel-powered emergency power reserves.
Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa told us at the beginning of July that available generation capacity was plateauing at about 29,000MW, giving enough room to bring power cuts down to stage 3 and lower, and even allowing Eskom to increase planned maintenance.
He said the government’s interventions to address the crisis were beginning to show results as temporary, marginal improvements were starting to turn into “real, maintained improvements”.
But the good times did not last.
By Wednesday night load-shedding was back with a vengeance, creeping towards stage 7 as the power cuts had to be increased to 6,400MW to balance a system that could only deliver 26,700MW to a country that, in the grips of an intense cold front, demanded 34,000MW (the feared maximum high).
It is too early to conclude that the return of stage 6 load-shedding this week means that the fixes Eskom, Ramokgopa and the National Energy Crisis Committee have been working on for the past year are not working.
We will have to wait and see how quickly Eskom is able to recover supply to around 29,000MW. A delay in the return to service of units after outages has been one of the contributors to persistent power cuts, and one of the operational problems Eskom has been working on improving.
One thing we do know for certain is that the ANC does not want South Africans to vote while the country is experiencing stage 6 load-shedding. It is desperate to fix — or at least improve — the energy crisis before 2024’s general elections. If it fails, the party’s support might very well fall below 50%.
For this reason, we can assume that for the moment the political will to improve electricity supply does exist, given the ANC’s self-interest in this matter. The question then is to what extent Eskom can really be fixed.
The long-term trend in energy availability factor (EAF) — a measure of electricity output as a share of total installed generation capacity — does not inspire much confidence, having declined from about 75% 10 years ago to 65% in 2021, before dropping sharply to about 57% in 2022. So far, 2023 has been the worst year yet with EAF sitting at around 52% up to the end of June.
If Eskom can stick to its timelines for fixes and commissioning at Kusile and Medupi it would add 3,200MW to the grid by the end of this year and another 1,600MW next year. The additional 4,800MW could make a real difference by the time SA votes next year.
Ultimately, the solution — as Eskom has long maintained — is to increase generation capacity. At least 6,000MW must be added in the short term, but over the medium and longer term the need increases exponentially to about 60,000MW.
In the absence of an updated Integrated Resources Plan there is no clear direction of where all this power is going to come from, but it will most likely be mainly from renewables which are being delayed by a lack of transmission grid capacity. Keeping a supply of candles in the medium term would seem to be a wise decision.
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