Gordhan, Eskom board to address latest power cuts

There is a high probability that the country will be hit by more power cuts this week as embattled power utility Eskom tries to recover from a shortage of generation capacity and replenish diesel and water resources.

The power utility, which is in a deep financial and operational crisis, is expected to give an indication on Monday on the way forward.

Public enterprises spokesperson Adrian Lackay on Sunday said minister Pravin Gordhan would meet with the Eskom board and management in the next 24 hours to establish what other steps could be taken to give South Africans greater certainty about the power supply.

He said the expectation had been that Eskom would have done the necessary maintenance work and repairs during the festive season so that there would be sufficient generating capacity to avoid load-shedding at the start of 2019.

“However, weaknesses in both the new power stations and their continued inability to perform according to expectations, and other unplanned breakdowns have regrettably resulted in this episode of load-shedding,” Lackay said.

Two months after the last round of power cuts hit SA, Eskom on Sunday implemented stage 2 load-shedding.

This was a result of a shortage of capacity and a need to replenish and preserve emergency water and diesel resources. Stage 2 calls for 2,000MW to be shed from the national grid. Eskom has an installed capacity of just below 38,000 MW.

Eskom’s acting head of generation, Andrew Etzinger, said that in the last week the reliability of generation plants had been poor and emergency reserves were exhausted.

For the next week, the odds of load-shedding were higher than usual because Eskom was “still recovering” from last week’s difficulties, Etzinger said.

A final call would be made on Monday, depending on what happened overnight.

“To be realistic, it is important to work on the assumption that there will be a high probability of load-shedding, but not definite,” he said.

The utility is in a dire financial position and sits with a debt burden of R419bn, which it is unable to service from the revenue it earns. It is also straining to keep the lights on, with multiple breakdowns of its old plants due to neglected maintenance, and substandard construction work contributing to problems at its new plants, notably Medupi.

There has also been a significant push-back from business and labour over Eskom’s application for tariff increases for the next three years of 17.1%, 15.4% and 15.5%, respectively.

Ramaphosa, during his state of the nation address last week, announced that Eskom would receive financial support from the state, the details of which will be announced in finance minister Tito Mboweni’s budget speech on February 20.

The return of load-shedding also comes after Ramaphosa announced that Eskom would be remodelled and split into three state-owned entities dealing with generation, transmission and distribution.

Noncore assets of stateowned enterprises would also be sold, but this did not mean that there would be privatisation of strategic state-owned assets, the president said.

The National Union of Mineworkers and the National Union of Metalworkers of SA have come out strongly against the unbundling of Eskom, saying it would just lead to massive job losses.

The unions have threatened to protest.