It's scary that Eskom always seems to be caught off guard by constant breakdowns and shortages in generation capacity.
SA had a disastrous last week which ended with stage 5 loadshedding, and yesterday it got even worse as we woke up to stage 6. The power utility has warned that the power outages could go above planned levels from today onwards.
Eskom CEO André de Ruyter said yesterday “given the current performance of our coal fleet we cannot deny there is a risk” of going over stage 6 of loadshedding.
“There is a risk and we need to prepare for this risk and hence the urgent need to replenish our [emergency] reserves,” he said during a press briefing in Johannesburg.
Breakdowns of power generating units led to stage 2 load shedding two weeks ago. We had blackouts in the afternoons right through to midnight. This escalated to stage 4 last week which moved up to stage 5 this past weekend.
Yesterday, Eskom said the move to stage 6 was because a unit had tripped at Kusile power station, and another at Kriel. The power utility also said it had experienced 45 breakdowns last week. That is a shocking number of breakdowns, one would expect some of the problems that led to the breakdowns to have been picked up during routine maintenance.
The way Eskom is operating is scary. What’s next? Are we going to wake up to total darkness, with Eskom executives as surprised as the rest of us?
We are now going into a new week on stage 6 load shedding, which is catastrophic for an already battered economy. The economy has taken much strain from the Covid-19 pandemic, July riots, floods and high international oil prices leading to devastating hikes in fuel prices.
As a result we are battling with a high cost of living – SA households are paying more than R500 extra every month for food compared to last year. The higher stages of load shedding will worsen this as the economy loses billons of rand during the outages.
De Ruyter said yesterday they would look into procuring 1,000MW of capacity from independent power producers to ease the burden on the grid. Why was this not done sooner to prevent stage 6?
Eskom comes across as reactive, responding to crises instead of planning ahead.
Eskom, please manage the current capacity wisely, until the solution is found as per the government's recently announced energy plan.
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