Newcastillians can look forward to an illuminated festive season with loadshedding suspended, according to the Electricity Minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa.
In a media briefing held on Thursday, 21 December 2023, Ramokgopa provided insights into the current state of the country’s power supply.
Ramokgopa highlighted that the nation currently boasts approximately 27,700 megawatts of available power, with demand hovering just above 24,000 megawatts. This surplus is credited for the absence of loadshedding in South Africa for the past week.
While acknowledging Eskom’s recent commendable performance, Ramokgopa stressed the need for sustained efforts to ensure consistent power supply. The country has enjoyed a week-long respite from loadshedding, owing to continuous improvements in generating capacity.
“During this period, we have seen an exceptionally good performance by the units. Outside the issues of reduced demand, we have seen that the unplanned capacity loss factor – a combination of the units being unreliable and the units not performing at the right levels – the system has been healthy,” stated Ramokgopa.
However, he said the problem is that the system was healthy at periods. “What we want to achieve is to ensure that we maintain that consistently, that the system remains healthy. We have prioritised these power stations and we are seeing the results, and I’m confident that this festive we will have the lights on,” Ramokgopa said.
The Minister further said that over the next two weeks, Eskom remains optimistic that the good performance of units will be sustained. However, he warned that “the true test” for the performance of the system is yet to come.
“You are not seeing loadshedding because we are working behind the scenes. We are aggressive on maintenance and the system is performing. The outlook, in the short term, looks upbeat and we want to ensure that the lights remain on. But the true test comes on the other side of the break when big industries come back. It’s about sustaining the South African economy. So, we can’t celebrate the fact that we don’t have loadshedding when the South African economy has gone on a temporary break. You want to have a situation of no loadshedding at the height of the performance of the South African economy,” he said.
Ramokgopa revealed that during this period, the power utility would see “aggressive maintenance” of power stations.
“We use this opportunity to do the actual work of ensuring that we are very aggressive in our maintenance programme so that we are able to take full advantage of the fact that demand has slowed down. We are going to benefit exceptionally when, as a country, we continue on this path of planned maintenance. But planned maintenance has got its own downsides. When we do planned maintenance, it simply means that I’m removing the units off the grid so I’m lessening my ability to generate the megawatts. That’s why we have used a combination of low demand and the healthy performance of units during this period to do not only planned maintenance, but opportunity maintenance,” he elaborated.
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