- Eskom Group Chief Executive, Dan Marokane, has reiterated the power utility’s commitment to bolstering electricity generation as it focuses on bringing new capacity online and completing its maintenance.
- The country’s Electricity and Energy Minister, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, is confident the country will reach a stage where there are no more blackouts.
- He says he expects additional generation capacity to help South Africans navigate winter without disruptions to the power supply but also said that the ball had been dropped and meetings around consequence management at underperforming power stations – Kendal, Matimba, Lethabo, Camden, Kusile and Koeberg, would take place.
This comes after Eskom announced the implementation of Stage 3 loadshedding from Friday until Monday due to unplanned losses and to replenish emergency reserves over the weekend while high levels of planned maintenance continued. It is the third bout of loadshedding in the last 5 weeks. Read more
“Our focus remains on bringing new capacity. Kusile unit 6 is going through its last stages of commissioning and we expect it to be synchronised to the grid by 18 March. We should have at the end of March and April Medupi unit 4 also synchronised. It is the combination of maintained units and the new capacity that will essentially form the backbone of our entry into the winter period and the winter period plans to be announced at the end of March,” Marokane said on Saturday in Pretoria during a media briefing.
Eskom is currently executing its maintenance plans ahead of the winter season to ensure a more stable electricity supply and reduce the risk of loadshedding.
“We will see that path starting to taper as we go into the end of March and April. The one issue that requires our attention is the clinical finish in the execution of the maintenance. As we return units back from maintenance they need to come in and stay online. In the last week, whilst we have done the maintenance, a number of units slipped in terms of their due dates of returning from the outages. We saw slippages of about 1500MW that are adding to the unplanned unavailability,” he said.
The unplanned slippages happened in conjunction with big units such as Koeberg being off the grid for more than a week. Read more
“We also experienced sub optimal coaling activity due to the intense weather conditions in the vicinity of Kusile from Thursday evening into Friday. It is on the back of this that our attention is really shifting towards getting back the tight discipline of executing our maintenance and getting the return and reliability of the units from the maintenance window to be such that we do not have this massive slippages adding pain to us,” Marokane said.
Eskom saw the unplanned capability loss factor rising from around 15 000MW in the middle of the week and on Friday it was at 18 000MW. This is what triggered the implementation of stage 3 loadshedding on Friday.
“Since than we returned 3 200MW by Saturday morning so quite a number of units came back, including two units at Kusile which returned last night at 10pm and this morning further units came back to give us the reduction in the unplanned losses.
“We are now sitting at about 4 500MW, on Sunday, we expect about 750MW capacity to come back. The remaining 2 800MW is expected to be returned by Monday morning. This will include the return of Koeberg unit 2 that has been on breakdown since last Sunday. Our plan is to finish the maintenance, get value of out of it and ensure that slippages do not occur,” the CEO concluded.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
