Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has emphasised that despite Eskom’s efforts to enhance its power generation, citizens should anticipate continued load-shedding.
The minister highlighted the unreliability of the majority of Eskom’s units, attributing the issue to ongoing planned maintenance aimed at addressing said reliability challenges.
“We will have periods of days of no load-shedding and there will be days of load-shedding,” the minister said.
“Eskom has announced its summer outlook and it makes the point that we should not be at a level higher than Stage 4 load-shedding.”
The minister also announced that Eskom was working to address issues of its fleet and used the opportunity to carry out planned maintenance.
“We have been working during the festive season to ensure that we address issues of the fleet to continue to perform, but also readying the fleet to ensure that once there is a ramp up of demand, the units are able to return back to service and remain in service while delivering efficient megawatts (MW),” Ramokgopa said.
The minister highlighted Eskom’s initiative to reduce scheduled maintenance, anticipating a rise in demand, while in December the return of three units at Kusile contributed to periods without load-shedding.
“If you had to look at the work that has been done at Eskom, they have reduced repeat failures.
We have additional buffer for instances of a cluster of units failing, where you do not have to initiate load-shedding or if you do, it is not at intense levels,” Ramokgopa explained.
The Electricity minister also said “Unit 1 at Kusile experienced significant delays in relation to the timeline to return to service, which was set for June last year but it returned five months later due to outage slips.
We are confident that the work that has been done by the generation team has ensured that we will not have a repeat when we want to return unit 2, which is currently out,” he said.
The minister reminded citizens that Koeberg unit 1 and 2 were extending the licenses of the only nuclear power station in the country after a significant amount of work was done to meet the regulatory requirements for license extensions.
“As part of this robust exercise, unit 1 in Koeberg is now on full load. It has passed the full load tests.
There is a plethora of tests that need to be run and the test was passed on 30 December,” started the minister.
“Now unit 1 in Koeberg is unleashing the MWs that are required and we hope it will continue to do that for the next 20 years.
Another development is the synchronisation of Kusile Power Station’s unit 5. This power is intermittent.
It is doing a number of tests, and it will go into full commercial operation for an average period of six months so they continue to do the tests,” Ramokgopa said.
Compiled by Warren Hawkins
