Eskom performs a Christmas miracle

Eskom has radically adjusted its planned maintenance schedule over Christmas and New Year’s, substantially reducing the chances of load-shedding.

In the early morning of Wednesday, 30 November 2022, MyBroadband published an article which explained that load-shedding could be implemented on Christmas for the first time since the rotational power cuts started.

That was based on Eskom’s feedback stating that South Africans should expect more intense load-shedding over the next six to 12 months, including the festive season.

We also looked at Eskom’s 52-week system status outlook as of Week 46 of 2022, the latest available at the time of publication.

That showed the utility would face a generating shortage of over 1,000MW (stage 1) during the week of 19–25 December under its “planned” risk level, which assumes 15,200MW in breakdowns.

That jumped to a shortage of over 2,001MW (stage 2) in Eskom’s “likely” risk scenario with 16,700MW of unplanned outages.

During the New Year’s week (26 December 2022—1 January 2023), Eskom had anticipated a shortage of less than 1,000MW under the same planned risk scenario, or over 2,001MW for the likely risk scenario.

In all its years of load-shedding, Eskom had never implemented power cuts over Christmas and New Year’s.

When we asked Eskom what its outlook for the festive season looked like this year, it directed us to its quarterly State of the System update on 15 November 2022, which indicated a high likelihood of load-shedding.

Compared to previous years, the dramatically increased likelihood of power cuts during this period seemed to be due to substantially higher planned maintenance than usual — between 7,000MW and 11,000MW.

We noted that Christmas load-shedding would be likely unless Eskom drastically changed its planned maintenance schedule.

Eskom’s sudden change of heart

With the recently-published Week 47 outlook, the utility has done exactly that.

Instead of the 8,956MW of generating capacity it had planned to take down for maintenance in the week of 19–25 December 2022 in the past few weeks’ system status outlooks, it now said it would only take down 6,641MW.

The difference of 2,315MW works out to about 26% less planned maintenance.

For the week of 26 December to 1 January 2023, the utility will now be subjecting only 7,537MW of capacity to planned maintenance, compared to 10,806MW in the outlook from Week 46.

That means it will take down 3,269MW less than it had planned — a reduction of 30%.

Even before Week 46’s outlook, Eskom had for weeks planned to take down around 10,000MW or more during this week.

The table below summarises Eskom’s changes in planned maintenance and the resulting improvements in available dispatchable capacity between the past few weeks’ outlooks.