Eskom spending millions on diesel, yet load shedding persists: economist
ENERGY economist Lungile Mashele has expressed concern over Eskom burning through money to pay for diesel, yet load shedding persists, after the power utility boss shared this month that it had already spent more than R620 million on the fuel.
In the first three weeks of the month, Eskom has used 48.5 million litres of diesel to meet power demands.
The power utility has 79 generation units at its coal-fired power stations and of these, 18 are offline.
Two more units are set to return to service in the next 24 hours.
Eskom chief executive Andre de Ruyter shared the figures during a media briefing following an announcement that stage 3 load shedding would be downgraded to stage 2.
The planned capacity outages stood at 5 349 megawatts (MW), while another 14 493MW of capacity was unavailable due to unplanned breakdowns.
De Ruyter could not guarantee that there would not be load shedding next week while there were hopes to end load shedding by the weekend.
“We don’t anticipate load shedding next week, however that is dependent on the stability of the generation units. There are risks in the system that are difficult to predict. This will depend on the performance and forecast in the Mpumalanga area, where the majority of our coal plants are located,” he said.
Eskom general manager Rhulani Mathebula said various reasons were behind this, including a unit switching off by itself or manually to protect it from having catastrophic failures.
“About 18 are offline because of unplanned outages, while eight are offline for planned maintenance. Only one unit will be gone for longer and is not included in the 18 that are down, the rest will be coming back soon. The only units that were off were planned and this shows we are recovering. But we still need to deal with the forecast rain over the coming weekend. Teams at power stations have mobilised to ensure we are able to manage,” he said.
According to Eskom’s chief financial officer Calib Cassim, for the last financial year (April 2021 to March 2022), the power utility has spent under R7 billion on its own diesel plants and a further R3.5bn on diesel used by independently owned plants.
Mashele said: “Eskom is burning through money to pay for diesel, yet load shedding persists. Coupled with that is the lack of maintenance. It would seem Eskom is focused on shortterm diesel solutions that yield no benefit as opposed to running adequate maintenance. There is a balance that needs to be struck between the two, however there seems to be an overreliance on expensive diesel.”
To a question about a skills problem and the prospect of approaching the market for operations and maintenance, De Ruyter said Eskom was implementing its own plan of insourcing contractors for maintenance.