Eskom skills warning

A former Eskom employee says a lack of incentives and the company’s demoralising reputation have led to a lack of skills at the entity, affecting its ability to maintain generation units and prevent load-shedding.

This is according to energy expert and former Eskom engineer Matthew Cruise, who told Cape Talk that Eskom’s skills issues are a commonly cited reason for its maintenance slippages.

Slippages refer to the delayed maintenance of generation units, which increases unplanned outages and the possibility of load-shedding.

At the beginning of May, Eskom chair Mteto Nyati said that its major shortfalls in recent months were primarily people-related.

“What we realised was not that we have issues relating to equipment, but rather people-related problems,” Nyati said.

“That’s a good thing because it means that Eskom can address these issues.”

Nyati said these issues primarily relate to Eskom’s leadership and management, such as following standard operating procedures and holding employees accountable.

However, Cruise said that the utility had been experiencing these problems since he joined in 2010.

He joined the entity as an engineer at the Komati Power Station, in the Eastern Cape, where he remained until 2012.

Cruise then moved to Eskom’s head office in Johannesburg, where he served as an engineering design manager and integration specialist until 2017.

“During my onboarding in 2010, some of the more senior employees would tell me that countries like China and Australia were poaching people from Eskom,” he said.

“For example, China is expanding its generation capacity by 40,000MW yearly, which is Eskom’s total capacity. So they would come along and offer our staff three times the salary.”

He added that working for the power utility was also very demoralising, as people often referred to employees as “the reason for load-shedding”, and the press constantly gave it a bad rep.

In addition, Cruise said that Eskom didn’t have the funding to increase salaries for four years and that staff promotions were temporarily prohibited for some time.

Slippages mean winter without load-shedding unlikely

Nyati’s comments were made during Eskom’s State of the System and Winter Outlook briefing.

During the briefing, generation head Bheki Nxumalo also noted several skill gaps experienced by contractors when addressing the issue of maintenance slippages.

“While most of the focus has been on the lack of skills at Eskom, many of our partners have come out to us saying that they have skills-related problems,” Nxumalo said.

“We have also agreed with our original equipment manufacturers (OEM) that they need skills capacitation. We need to look at everyone working within our fleet.”

Cruise referred to slippages as the primary contributor to the country’s unplanned loss of generation capacity which sat at 16,000MW on Tuesday.

He noted a recent Eskom statement saying the country won’t have load-shedding if unplanned generation outages remain below 13,000MW.

“Eskom said that if we go above 15,000MW, then we can expect stage two load-shedding, and if unplanned outages go up by another 1,000MW, we can expect stage three.”

The country has yet to be hit by scheduled blackouts, thanks to Eskom’s open-cycle gas turbine generators.

Cruise says Eskom has been running at maximum capacity to compensate for the lack of generating capacity.

However, doing so is a costly affair. Since the beginning of April, the state-owned utility has spent R3.76 billion on diesel to operate these generators since 1 April.

This is equivalent to an average of R73 million per day, with most spent in a day estimated at R274 million on 4 April.

Overall, the R3.76 billion allowed Eskom to generate 631.51 GW of electricity from 1 April to 9 June.

Cruise also noted that despite the cold weather experienced around the country, Eskom is yet to see the surge in demand typical of this time of year.

“Eskom has indicated that it expects the worst conditions for the grid, where there is high demand and low supply, to occur between mid-June and mid-July,” he said.

“So we can expect these conditions from the week of 16 June until 20 July when load-shedding is likely.”