Electricity users’ honeymoon will soon be over as Eskom forecasts that crippling rotational power cuts would return during winter after a month of no power supply interruption.
Eskom, however, has assured the public that load shedding would be contained within Stage 2 during winter, from May to August, as it continued to ramp up maintenance of its coal fleet to meet demand.
The struggling power utility also warned that the worst-case scenario would be Stage 5 load shedding during the period as demand would peak.
During the State of the System and Winter Outlook media briefing today, Eskom Group CEO Dan Marokane said the scenario of Stage 2 load shedding was premised on the 14 000 megawatt plant outages.
Marokane said the utility’s ability to meet load shedding this winter depended on collective collaboration, hence Eskom would be launching an energy saving campaign next month.
Marokane said partial load losses and capacity losses would be a focal point in addition to the capacity returns Eskom had done.
“For winter 2024, the likely scenario from our assumptions is that load shedding will be maintained within Stage 2 at most,” he said.
“In the extreme case where the unreliability increases, that component may occasionally go to Stage 5. But we really think that on the basis of what we see, the performance of the fleet, load shedding will stay within Stage 2 from a planning perspective.”
Marokane said that was on the back of a decrease in terms of the baseline unreliability capacity reduction of 1 000MW, which was what Eskom uses for baseline assumptions.
“Over the winter period, work continues and we are targeting to reduce the unplanned (load) losses by a further 1 700MW,” he said.
“This will be made up of 1 300MW from a partial load loss reduction that (Eskom Group executive for generation Bheki Nxumalo) is driving with the team, but also one that will also show you how the demand side management initiatives are also under way.”
This comes as Eskom suspended the implementation of load shedding for 30-consecutive days, albeit spending half of its diesel budget to run its Open-Cycle Gas Turbines emergency units.
For the financial year ended March 2024, Eskom had a R29 billion diesel budget and had been spending approximately R2.5bn on diesel every month in a “bad month” when power cuts peaked at Stage 6 load shedding.
“With regard to the 30 days of consecutive low load shedding, this was achieved with the diesel spent being 50% of the budget, a budget that is actually half of what was there previously,” Marokane said.
“What is really behind the performance that we are seeing is capacity that is emerging from the work that we’re doing from maintenance and we are not burning diesel to the extent that others would like to believe.
“In fact, with my understanding, there’s quite a number of vessels floating in our ports in our seas now unable to sell the diesel that they've anticipated will need at this point.”
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