Good news about load-shedding

Eskom says it suspended load-shedding at 06:00 on Sunday morning after sufficiently replenishing its emergency reserves.

After ten months without rotational power cuts, the state-owned power utility implemented stage 3 load-shedding at 17:00 on Friday, 31 January.

Eskom announced load-shedding after an earlier warning on Friday that caused the rand to weaken as much as 0.5% against the dollar.

Bonds also softened, with the yield on benchmark 2035 government notes rising 8 basis points to 10.4% before paring losses.

Eskom initially planned for load-shedding to last throughout the weekend to allow it to refill its emergency generation reserves for the coming week.

During a press briefing on Friday afternoon, electricity and energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said this represents a temporary setback.

He said Eskom would work to restore the system to normal levels by Monday. “We remain on course,” he said.

Ramokgopa said Eskom’s leadership was exceptionally disappointed that it had to take the step after 10 months without load-shedding.

Ramokgopa explained that a “perfect” storm of multiple unplanned breakdowns and continued necessary planned maintenance had resulted in the power utility depleting its emergency generation reserves in the past week.

Eskom suffered six unit outages at two of its best-performing coal-fired power stations — Lethabo and Mathimba.

In addition, the power utility had experienced delays in bringing units out of service back online.

The minister also said Eskom had stuck to its intensified planned maintenance schedule to increase overall fleet reliability, again emphasising its strategy of “short-term pain for long-term gain.”

“We are not going to compromise on planned maintenance,” the minister said.

He emphasised that the trendlines in unplanned breakdowns and the energy availability factor were still showing an overall improvement in the utility’s generation performance.

Eskom CEO Dan Marokane said that the power utility had to implement load-shedding to refill water levels at the utility’s pumped storage schemes and diesel reserves for its open-cycle gas turbines over the weekend.

The power utility’s generation head, Bheki Nxumalo, explained that the most common problem was boiler tube leaks, a recurring issue with Eskom’s ageing coal station fleet.

Nxumalo said five of the six units that broke down were still offline by Friday afternoon. Some of these are planned to return to the service over the weekend.

The outages resumed a day after the regulator granted Eskom permission to raise tariffs by 12.7% in the next financial year, well short of the 36% it requested.

Marokane said the resumption of load-shedding wouldn’t change Eskom’s approach toward improving its operational performance. 

“We continue along the path that we started,” he said. “That’s the focus that we have — improving reliability.”