Eskom meets evening peak demand despite cold snap
Eskom says it continued to supply electricity to the country without load shedding yesterday, in what it said was one of the coldest days of the year.
According to Eskom, electricity demand is expected to rise sharply over the next few days due to the cold weather conditions and it has adequate power supply to meet the demand.
"Yesterday, our month to date energy availability factor was recorded at 80.78% in line with our target. In addition, Eskom has not utilised its open cycle gas turbines (OCGT) for the past 25 days. The OCGT load factor year-to-date is 0.27%, against a target of 2%, with no diesel usage over the past weekend. This equates to a total cost of R93.35-million this financial year, against the budget of R963.85-million. As part of our drive to continually save costs through efficiencies and minimal use of our OCGTs we are certainly moving in the right direction," it said in a statement.
Eskom maintains that is has not implemented load shedding in over 11 months.
Eskom, however, said customers in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal may be experiencing outages due to the inclement weather conditions.
"Several roads were closed which has prevented staff from accessing some of the networks. Eskom personnel have been working around the clock to determine the extent of the damage and to bring the lines back to service in the accessible areas. Customers in the affected areas are advised to treat all installations as live for safety reasons."
Eskom is urging customers across the country to continue to use electricity efficiently in order to reduce pressure on the power grid.