Ramokgopa: Less load-shedding ‘not an act of God’

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The current recovery in energy supply availability to about 60% is sustainable, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Sunday.

It was not luck that has allowed Eskom to improve output and keep load-shedding below stage three in recent days but rather the result of a concerted effort to reduce outages and outage slippage, which occurs when the utility is unable to return units to service on schedule. 

“It is a function of the expertise that is sitting with us, it is a function of us working with the original equipment manufacturers, it is a function of us understanding the units better and applying a degree of science,” Ramokgopa told a media briefing. 

“I’m trying to take time to say to you that what we are seeing, the improvement, is not an act of God, this is people at work doing everything possible to make sure that we are able to resolve this energy crisis.”

He said Eskom had been able to reduce capacity loss caused by plant failures to about 15 000 megawatts, which was the best case scenario forecast in its planning for winter.

“And we can say that consistently we have been right at 15 000 megawatts or less and one of the days we even recorded just below 14 000 megawatts.”

He said this has in turn allowed Eskom space to take offline more units than planned to perform routine maintenance.

“Just on the 7th of July we were able to take out double what we had planned, so we were able to because of the room that has been created by the performance of these units we were able to take out 5 280 [megawatts], and this is by design; we have chosen to take it out and you are not seeing it in the aggravation of the load-shedding situation in the country.

“Of course load-shedding is bad in all its elements, but we can say that we are able to maintain that permutation of zero to three, or one to three” stages of load-shedding, he said.

“And this is testament to the fact that this recovery is sustainable, this recovery is enduring. I think that is the message that I want to convey.”

The worst-case scenario for capacity loss in winter had been about 18 000 megawatts.  He said the higher levels of ongoing maintenance should mean fewer outages in the near future, and has allowed Eskom to limit recourse to burning diesel to ensure caseload.

“One of the biggest takeaways of this recovery is that we are engaging these open-cycle gas turbines less and less, so only during periods where the severity … especially during the evening peak; that is where we are engaging them.”

Ramakgopa said the highest level of demand Eskom has seen so far this winter was about 30 800 megawatt, but said this too was not simply fortuitous but also a factor of initiatives taken by the state, business and industry. Despite a cold snap forecast for this week, demand was expected to remain within that figure.

Ultimately, he said, the problem was one of insufficient electricity generation and that is where the solution lay. 

He said independent reviews were underway to “learn through a third lens” as it considered the decommissioning of more coal-fired plans.

Ramokgopa stressed that the country needed huge investment in the electricity transmission grid to be able to accommodate new capacity, and to allow the rollout of independent power projects that would yield 10 000 megawatts. 

“We have now in the pipeline of more than 10 000 megawatts of projects that are ready to come on stream, [but] of course transmission remains an issue,” he said, recalling that in the past decade Eskom laid down only about 4 000 kilometres of transmission lines.

“For us to be able to accommodate new generation capacity, especially renewables, we need to roll out in the next 10 years about three and a half fold of what we have done in the past 10 years. Of course, it is going to call for a lot of resourcing from a financing view, also from a technical point of view.”

As far as funding for grid investment went, Eskom has prioritised acquiring 25 transformers that would allow the addition of 12 000 megawatts to the grid by 2028.