The man stopping load-shedding in South Africa

Less than a year after he was appointed the head of Eskom’s generation division, Bheki Nxumalo has achieved what many experts thought impossible — improving the state of the power utility’s ageing coal fleet and delivering a lasting break in load-shedding.

Nxumalo’s appointment as Eskom group executive for generation was announced on 14 April 2023. He had extensive experience in operations, power station management, and production.

Nxumalo’s career in the energy sector started over two decades ago, and he has been working at Eskom since 2010.

Before taking on his latest role, he was Eskom Enterprise and Eskom Rotek Industries CEO. He also served as station manager at two power plants, and was general manager at Kusile.

At his appointment as head of generation, Nxumalo said he was honoured to take up the position at a critical time.

“I literally grew up in Eskom. I strongly believe that Eskom has the technical and managerial capability to turn things around,” Nxumalo said.

“The majority of Eskom employees are passionate about their work and company. I know that I can count on the support of my colleagues in Exco and the new Eskom board to make this a reality.”

Under Nxumalo’s leadership, Eskom has not implemented load-shedding in nearly two months — the longest break since August and September 2021.

The power utility has received some help from a reduction in overall and peak electricity demand in early 2024 compared to previous years.

This decline has been driven by increased private rooftop solar generation among households and businesses.

However, according to Eskom’s recent system status outlooks, its coal fleet’s energy availability factor (EAF) has also improved significantly.

The EAF shows the portion of Eskom’s total nominal capacity available to provide power over a certain period.

For week 20 of 2024, Eskom’s EAF stood at 64.83%, compared with 56.33% in week 20 of 2023. In addition, the average weekly EAF of 55.38% for the year-to-date is higher than the 52.76% EAF at the same point last year.

Another indication that things have taken a turn for the better is the unplanned outage factor dropping to around 25% in recent weeks, where it was well over 35% at the same time last year.

EE Business Intelligence head and energy expert Chris Yelland labelled the turnaround “remarkable”.

Yelland previously told MyBroadband it would be near-impossible for Eskom to improve its EAF quickly. He said the performance of Eskom’s fleet would first need to stabilise before a turnaround could begin.

He expected load-shedding in 2024 to be roughly the same as in 2023, but so far, it has been substantially less severe.

Bheki Nxumalo, Eskom head of generation

Right leadership key to Generation Recovery Plan

Eskom and electricity minister Kgosienthso Ramokgopa has credited the improvement to the implementation of Eskom’s Generation Recovery Plan, developed by the utility’s board.

Board chair Mtetho Nyati said having a comprehensive maintenance plan was essential, but that any plan was only as good as its execution.

“You can have a plan, but if you do not implement it, then it is useless. That is a big problem in South Africa. We dream, but we can never execute.”

He said that changes to Eskom’s management team, particularly Nxumalo’s appointment, transformed the company.

Since his appointment, Nxumalo has reviewed Eskom’s plant managers and other senior employees at its power stations.

This has resulted in extensive changes to the leadership at some of the utility’s worst-performing power stations.

Nyati said the new board spoke to power station managers and listened to them, allowing them to discover the systemic issues affecting the business.

They learned that six power stations contributed to 70% of Eskom’s unit failures, while five power stations were performing well.

Armed with this knowledge, the management team devised a plan to maintain the good performance while rapidly improving the six plants whose performance was below par.

Eskom focused its planned maintenance schedule on improving these plants rather than five that were performing quite well.

The utility has also enlisted the services of original equipment manufacturers to ensure that the maintenance work has a long-lasting impact.

As a result of these changes, Eskom has conducted more maintenance in the last year than in the previous three.

“This is why Eskom is where it is now,” he said.