Who to blame for Stage 6 power cuts
Independent energy expert Hilton Trollip says that Eskom’s current load-shedding woe is due to the failures of the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE).
Trollip explained that the DMRE is required by law to make plans well in advance to connect new generation capacity to South Africa’s power grid, which it has failed to do for more than a decade.
“We don’t have enough generation connected to the grid, and the power stations that are connected are old or badly designed,” Trollip said during an interview with 702.
“The cause of that is the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, which is required by legislation to make plans well in advance to connect such generation to the grid.
“They haven’t done that for 12 years,” said Trollip.
The Energy Regulation act specifies that nobody other than the DMRE can connect new generation capacity to the grid unless authorised by the department.
Trollip said that while there have been issues at Eskom, the problems are secondary to the DMRE’s failure to add new capacity to the power grid.
“The primary problem is to connect generation to the grid. The energy regulation act says nobody else may do that unless authorised by the department, and they haven’t done that for the past 12 years, and they don’t have any plans on the table to do that,” he said.
“That is the cause. Eskom is the symptom.”
Talk 702’s Ray White mentioned that energy minister Gwede Mantashe had planned to add private power producers to the grid, effectively bringing load-shedding to an end within three years.
However, Trollip said that the plans came out far too late, involved far too little generating capacity, and are plagued by bad execution on the part of the DMRE.
He said South Africa would be drifting in and out of load-shedding at various levels in the coming years.
“I can assure you unless they update those plans and start implementing them better, we won’t be out of the woods in three years,” Trollip said.
“There are about 90 units in 16 [coal] power stations, and they all behave in a fairly random way when it comes to breakdowns, but because they’re old, we know that they are breaking down much more often.”
“So we will be drifting in and out of load-shedding at various levels,” he added.
To add to Eskom’s woes, its maintenance programme doesn’t appear to make power plants more reliable.
New data — which tracked the performance of Eskom’s generating units between August 2020 and October 2021 at 14 of its power plants — revealed that half of the units broke down again within nine months of being repaired.
Included in the worst-performing units following maintenance were the following:
- Hendrina Unit 7 — 89% downtime within the first nine months after repairs in February 2020
- Kusile Unit 1 — 68% downtime within the first nine months after repairs in September 2021
- Two Tutuka units — average 57.4% downtime following repairs in November 2020 and March 2021
Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha said the declining performance was expected as most of its power stations are old.
He added that unit breakdowns are so frequent that it is impossible to conduct proper maintenance.
MyBroadband asked Eskom if it has a plan to address load-shedding with the generating capacity at its disposal, but the power utility did not immediately answer our questions.