Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan has laid out what is happening at Eskom and how they plan to fix problems at the state-owned entity.<\/p>\n
Eskom has implemented stage 2 load-shedding for several days in a row in South Africa, causing massive frustration for citizens and businesses.<\/p>\n
Gordhan spoke to the media in a press briefing today, where he stated they have taken\u00a0an intensive look at what is not working at Eskom, and how these issues can be fixed.<\/p>\n
Four points\u00a0Gordhan said are important to address were:<\/p>\n
In terms of why load-shedding was taking place,\u00a0Gordhan said there were several reasons: including a lack of skills at Eskom, problems with coal supply systems, and problems with the power generation system.<\/p>\n
He added that Eskom was one of the institutions heavily affected by state capture and contracts being awarded to the Gupta family.<\/p>\n
“Today we feel the effect of state capture, and the reality that we have very old power stations that we are operating,” said\u00a0Gordhan.<\/p>\n
Gordhan said that as it stands, Eskom has\u00a047,000MW of installed capacity.<\/p>\n
Planned outages, however, have cut down operations. These are put in place to let repairs take place, and come in at 7,500MW.<\/p>\n
There have also been between 9,000MW to 11,000MW in breakdowns, in combination with the “reserve margin” which is required for safety reasons.<\/p>\n
“In reality, we are only able to supply 26,000MW, along with unpredictable breakdowns,” he said.<\/p>\n
South Africa’s power demand in summer is\u00a029,000MW.<\/p>\n
A reason for unplanned breakages – which measure up to 11,000MW – is that from\u00a0about 2010, the investment in maintaining and repairing power stations was not adequate.<\/p>\n
The reason is that not enough money was put into repairs, said\u00a0Gordhan.<\/p>\n
The quality of maintenance is also a problem, as proper repairs need to be done at all times.<\/p>\n
Technical skills in Eskom are not there to make proper repairs, and supervision of contractors who make repairs is not done.<\/p>\n
Gordhan added that Kusile and Medupi are meant to be providing\u00a07,800MW into the system – and they are not.<\/p>\n
To combat load-shedding,\u00a0Gordhan has insisted that a week-by-week-plan must be implemented in the coming days to instruct who\u00a0will take responsibility and what are the time frames of assessing weak points in power stations.<\/p>\n
Consequence management must also be implemented.<\/p>\n
All senior managers at Eskom have been asked to cancel their leave and personally visit power stations to see what the state of affairs is.<\/p>\n
Additionally, between 15 December and 15 January no load shedding is expected due to businesses shutting down.<\/p>\n
Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan has laid out what is happening at Eskom and how they plan to fix problems at the state-owned entity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":130890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27995],"tags":[181,35,8487,4198],"class_list":["post-288702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","tag-eskom","tag-headline","tag-load-shedding","tag-pravin-gordhan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":288704,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288702\/revisions\/288704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}