De Ruyter predicts low risk of load shedding this winter
Power utility Eskom says it’s working tirelessly to keep South Africans out of the dark this coming winter.
The country has been without load shedding since the start of March and Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter says they’re doing all they can to keep the blackouts at bay.
On Wednesday evening, De Ruyter told MPs that the national lockdown gave the power utility a chance to implement short-term opportunity maintenance at some plants.
“We have created buffered capacity of some 2000 megawatts. We’ve also through demand management interventions as well as the procurement of additional capacity added another 900 megawatts of available capacity.
“We believe that these interventions, the likelihood of load shedding as indicated in the coming winter has been significantly reduced from our previous forecast.”
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De Ruyter also said that the probability of Stage 1 load shedding was reduced to a mere three days for the first quarter of the year, thanks to the lockdown.
“The first and major impact that Covid-19 has had was that we saw a very drastic drop in demand.
“I have a high degree of confidence that when demand recovers fully that we will see able to meet the demand by returning those units to service.”
He added: “The development of demand depends very much on the way the lockdown is lifted – whether there is a big bang approach to allow industries to return to work or what has been the case up to now, a more gradual and phased in approach.”
At the same time De Ruyter admitted that the system remains unstable.
He also reiterated that the government is still planning to unbundle the embattled power utility into three divisions – distribution, transmission and generation – as part of its restructuring process.
Listen to Andre de Ruyter below: