Eskom and electricity minister lying about planned maintenance

Energy expert Chris Yelland has accused Eskom and electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa of misleading the public about the intensity of the power utility’s maintenance programme.

Yelland shared three graphs on X on 13 March 2025 showing the Eskom generating fleet’s energy availability factor (EAF), planned capacity loss factor (PCLF), and unplanned capacity loss factor (UCLF) since 2023.

One graph showed that the PCLF, which represents the proportion of Eskom’s generating fleet that is unavailable due to planned outages, moving between 2023 and 2024’s levels in the first 10 weeks of 2025.

“Contrary to the messaging from the Minister and Eskom of aggressive levels of maintenance this year, the actual levels of planned maintenance outages are consistently lower for the first 10 weeks of 2025 compared to the same period last year,” Yelland said.

Over the past year, Ramokgopa has repeatedly emphasised that Eskom was taking “short-term pains for long-term gains” in its planned maintenance strategy, which could increase the likelihood of load-shedding.

Eskom had made similar statements about an “intensified” and “aggressive” planned maintenance strategy with more capacity taken offline recently than in previous years.

Although these statements seemed to be supported by data in 2024, there has been a shift in early 2025.

After the latest bout of load-shedding, the power utility’s CEO Dan Marokane admitted to “schedule slippages” in its planned maintenance programme.

These had contributed to a sudden surge in unplanned breakdowns from 13,000MW to 18,000MW, necessitating stage 3 load-shedding.

That being said, Eskom’s weekly unplanned outages have mostly been below 2024 and 2023’s levels, apart from three weeks in which they were worse than last year.

Another concerning trend that Yelland highlighted is that the weekly EAF has been below levels in 2021 and 2022.

The graphs below summarise the Eskom generating fleet’s weekly average EAF, PCLF, and UCLF performance over the past few years.

EAF — Total percentage of fleet available to provide power

PCLF — Capacity unavailable due to planned maintenance

UCLF — Capacity unavailable due to unplanned breakdowns

Recovery slower than expected

While Eskom suffered setbacks in its generation recovery plan in early 2025, its EAF is still much better than in the past two years.

After 10 weeks, the average EAF in the year-to-date stood at 56.62%, compared with 51.97% at the same point in 2024.

Eskom will have to sustain improvements to match or exceed the 59.62% EAF recorded over the entire 2024.

The EAF is expected to get a boost from the synchronisation of the 800MW Kusile Unit 6 to the grid, which is expected to happen before the end of March 2025.

However, even with its contribution, the Eskom board is likely to miss its target EAF of 65% by the end of the month, which was already pushed out from a year earlier.

With just three weeks to go before 31 March 2025, it would take a miracle for the utility to close the remaining eight percentage point gap between the current average EAF and the target.