Power system under pressure: Eskom
South Africa’s power system remains under pressure as Eskom continues with its planned maintenance programme, the power utility said on Monday.
Eskom urged the public to save 10 percent of their usual electricity usage, especially during peak times between 5pm and 9pm, in its bi-weekly system status bulletin.
“This will make it significantly easier to manage the power system during this challenging time, while also enabling us to do planned maintenance to ensure the reliability of our plant.”
On Monday the peak demand for electricity was forecast as 33,630MW and the available capacity to meet this was 35,078MW, including open cycle gas turbines.
Planned maintenance stood at 3738MW, while unplanned cuts accounted for 4293MW.
On Sunday the peak demand was 30,825MW, and an available capacity of 34,571MW.
Peak demand for the coming week was forecast at 33,383 megawatts on Tuesday, 33,374MW on Wednesday, 33,479MW on Thursday and 32,053MW on Friday.
Anticipated demand for the weekend stood at 31,118MW on Saturday and 30,823MW on Sunday.
On Monday, it was reported in Business Day that Eskom’s capacity exceeded demand by only 0.17 percent last Monday.
Eskom spokeswoman Hilary Joffe reportedly attributed this to units shut down over the weekend for planned maintenance which did not return to service in time.
Energy analyst Chris Yelland told the newspaper: “That is as close to the edge as you can get.
“It is running this country at high risk.”
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