Eskom needs help to run its power plants after losing skilled workers

Eskom director Clive le Roux said their power station reliability had deteriorated, prompting them to seek external expertise to address the issues as they lacked experienced staff.

Le Roux revealed this information during a parliamentary portfolio committee hearing on electricity and energy on 14 May 2025.

He said when Eskom put the Generation Recovery Plan together two years ago, they would need six years to repair the units and get them into high-quality performance mode.

It would take six years to recycle all the coal-powered generation units through a maintenance plan and install high-quality parts through high-quality workmanship.

Eskom’s performance began to improve, enabling the power utility to cease load-shedding as of 1 April 2024. However, this would not last.

In November 2024, Eskom began to notice that the improving trend was flattening. Between January and March 2025, Eskom experienced negative reliability trends.

During this period, load-shedding returned. Between January and April 2025, Eskom had to implement load-shedding five times.

It also had to implement load-shedding in May 2025 after the delayed return of 3,120 MW of generation units and an additional loss of 1,385 MW due to unplanned breakdowns.

Le Roux explained that one of the biggest problems was that generation units were not returned to service on time, as was the case during the last bout of load-shedding.

Another reason was that units returned to service was unreliable, which caused breakdowns soon after they returned to service.

Due to the deteriorating Eskom power plant performance, the board requested Eskom to seek external support to address the problems.

The company previously went out on an open inquiry for engineering companies, which Le Roux proved to be the wrong route.

“So, this time we’ve asked the executives to go out on a relational basis to find utilities that have experience running coal plants,” he said.

He explained that Eskom’s power plants rely more on experienced people than on qualified people. “We don’t have sufficient experience at the moment in the power plants,” he said.

Loss of skills at Eskom

Eskom’s skills problem should not come as a surprise. For years, experts warned that Eskom was playing with fire by prioritising race targets over retaining experienced and skilled staff.

In 2023, energy analyst Sampson Mamphweli said Eskom experienced a skills crisis. “When you look at the skills required to run Eskom, the utility no longer has them,” he said.

“The fact that maintenance runs overtime and over budget, while also being of poor quality, reflects the lack of skills at Eskom.”

The exodus of skilled employees began over a decade ago when the utility underwent an aggressive transformation process.

As part of this agenda, Eskom trained black engineers and pushed them into high-ranking positions within the organisation.

“In that process, Eskom lost good white engineers who chose to work overseas or in the private sector due to the increased political interference at the utility,” he said.

Even black engineers trained at Eksom have begun to leave the utility because of the deteriorating working environment, heightened political pressure, and low employee morale.

He added that it affected Eskom in the immediate term and will have an even greater impact over the coming decades.

He said the power utility has lost the ability to train engineers and has lost employees with operational experience.

Many other experts have also warned that only a small percentage of Eskom employees possess the necessary skills to perform their duties.

In 2015, trade union Solidarity warned that it was playing with fire by alienating white employees.

This was after news emerged that Eskom wanted to decrease its white employees by up to 3,400 to meet strict race targets.

By then, Eskom had already shed more than 10,000 white staff, including many experienced and skilled technical personnel.

Eskom was on an aggressive drive to reach its target of reflecting the national racial demographics by 2020.

While Eskom denied that it would retrench white employees to meet its racial quotas, Solidarity said the power utility created an environment which encouraged white staff to leave.

Solidarity said that Eskom’s decline, which caused load-shedding, was linked to its aggressive affirmative action policy through which it lost thousands of skilled employees.

This article was first published by Daily Investor and is reproduced with permission.