Eskom hoping to suspend load shedding by Friday
Eskom says the persistent rain over large parts of the country is mostly to blame for its failure to return more generation units to service.
The power utility’s management team briefed the media on Tuesday morning.
The briefing came shortly after it was forced to ramp up load shedding to stage 4 for most of the week due to a lack of generation capacity.
Eskom generation executive Phillip Dukashe said the cold and rainy weather led to an increase in demand for electricity, which in turn impacted the utility’ ability to carry out planned maintenance.
“We have had a very cold long weekend. We were hoping during this weekend that we are going to be covering and catching up on some of the maintenance that needed to be done. We had communicated last week that a number of units that were at risk – it was around 10 000 MW and we needed to take some units off in order to work with them, but on a consistent basis the demand were much higher than what the focus was. We didn’t manage to take them off and that impacted the planning.”
“Some of those units have unfortunately taken themselves off and that is why we find ourselves in this situation. Some of our units, impacted by rain, we had to constantly support them using fuel oil and sometimes we lose combustion as a result of wet coal.
“We've got problems with the flowing of coal, so I think these are things we've managed well in the first bout of rain that we've had. If the rain is consistent, then our ability to manage becomes very difficult,” he added.
Dukashe said while the rolling blackouts are expected to last for most of the week, the utility doesn’t foresee a need to implement stage 6 load shedding.
“We do not see that happening this week. Obviously one can never say for sure where things would be, but in terms of where we are, we do not see that happening this week.
“We expect some units coming back tomorrow and some coming back on Thursday and that will help to ensure that we recover from where we are. So at this stage, we do not foresee that there will be a need for stage 6 load shedding, at least not this week.”
He says the utility hopes to be in a position to suspend load shedding by Thursday or Friday.
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