Eskom: Light will shine on election
Earlier this week, the ailing utility’s chief operating officer assured the public it would try to avoid loadshedding as voters head to the polls on Monday
Eskom has announced a plan to keep the lights on come election day on 1 November. The Wednesday night announcement followed the return of stage 4 load-shedding announced on Wednesday morning, which the utility had said was set to last until Saturday morning.
But in the live-streamed announcement, Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan said load-shedding would be downgraded. “It’s important that we focus on going beyond load-shedding and I can assure you that, over the next few days everything possible will be done … on election day, and possibly in the days leading up to the election day as well [and] extraordinary measures will have to be taken in order to find the appropriate support that Eskom requires in order to fulfil its function.”
Gordhan said plans were in place for the thousands of voting stations to be divided into clusters that would have generators and technicians on standby in case of difficulties.
“The following is likely to happen over the next few days,” Gordhan said. “The first is that overnight 1000MW of power will be sent to operations. And as a result, it is expected that the system will be downgraded from a level four load-shedding to level two or level three load-shedding. Then overnight [on Thursday] and Friday, a few more 1000MW units will be put back as a result of units returning to operations and that will result in a downgrade from level three to level two. Over the weekend, load-shedding announced by the management will stop, which means that South Africans go to the polls on Monday,” he said, adding “Over the next few days there will be no load-shedding, unless there is some unexpected event.”
He said the 10 major result centres would have generation capacity in case something “untoward occurs”.
The scanners used by the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) during voting have a battery life of 12 hours. Gordhan said a hotline team would be on standby for IEC centres.
Capacity shortfalls
Earlier, the ailing power utility said the return to stage 4 rotational blackouts, which effectively entail shedding up to 4 000MW of capacity to avoid tripping the national grid, were caused by a further shortage of generation capacity.
In the 24 hours leading up to the announcement, Eskom said it had had to shut down a unit at its Lethabo power station and one at Arnot, while Medupi, Kusile and Matla each had one unit trip.
“This constrained the power system, further requiring extensive use of emergency reserves and, therefore, hampering the recovery of these reserves,” the power utility said.
“Total breakdowns currently amount to 14957MW while planned maintenance is 5301MW of capacity.”
This translates into a loss of more than half the power utility’s coal generation capacity of about 37 000MW,
which was also the case on Saturday night 30 October.
Eskom reiterated that load-shedding was implemented “as a last resort to maintain the stability of the power system regardless of the stage of load-shedding”.
Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter, who joined Gordhan for the media briefing, said that stage four was a way the utility could keep the lights on during the elections.
Earlier this week, Eskom warned that the system would remain constrained until the end of August 2022.
In an earlier briefing on Monday morning, the utility’s chief operating officer, Jan Oberholzer, said Eskom would avoid power cuts on election day by drawing on its emergency reserves during the day and replenishing those reserves at night.
“I’ve spoken to the generation, transmission and distribution colleagues to be on standby from the end of this week until after the voting has taken place to make sure that, where we do have challenges, the Eskom colleagues will assist,” he said.
Eskom, saddled with a creaking generation infrastructure after years of poor maintenance, has had to implement intermittent rolling
blackouts for the past 13 years or so to avoid overwhelming the national grid.
During Monday’s briefing, Oberholzer noted that, since September, Eskom has increased its planned maintenance programme to an average 5500MW of capacity — almost double the average maintenance carried out between September 2019 and April 2020.
“Our objective is to achieve a reliable and sustainable generation plant, thereby reducing the risk and frequency of the occurrence of loadshedding. As such, Eskom will not compromise on reliability maintenance and mid-life refurbishment,” Oberholzer said.
“However painful in the short term, this maintenance we have to do to ensure future reliability.”
Planned maintenance
De Ruyter reiterated this when he said that despite the current difficulties, Eskom was sticking to its planned maintenance programme. “Eskom will cut back on short-term maintenance but we will not bring back units on long-term outages; 5000MW are on planned maintenance and we will stick to that.
Eskom conceded that the rotational power cuts were a significant drag on South Africa’s economy, which is still reeling from the blow dealt by Covid-19 lockdowns.
Oberholzer said: “We are aware that the increased maintenance does elevate the probability of loadshedding in the short term. But this is necessary to improve the future performance of the generation fleet.”
In the year to date, the energy availability factor (EAF) has declined to 65%, missing a target of 70%, according to Eskom. “A key contributor to the low EAF was the high levels of planned maintenance during the summer months. However, there has also been an increase in unplanned outages during this period.”
South Africa needs an additional 4000MW to 6000MW of capacity to help Eskom undertake its maintenance programme, Oberholzer emphasised.
“Because Eskom — at this point in time — we are shy [of capacity]. And what we have available in terms of capacity to grow the economy of the country is really challenging,” he said.
Eskom, which supplies about 95% of South Africa’s electricity, most of it from coal-fired power stations, says work is in progress to allow the connection of utility-scale renewable generation projects under its renewable energy independent power producer procurement programme, which are expected to be connected to the national electricity grid by 2024-25.
Eskom’s group executive for transmission, Segomoco Scheppers, said earlier this week: “We are also making our systems ready to connect the additional 2 000MW capacity procured through the risk mitigation independent power producer procurement programme and this capacity is expected to be available during the course of next year.”
The total Eskom transmission capital plan amounts to R178billion over the next 10 years. Of this amount, R144-billion is required for new capacity expansion projects to meet reliability requirements, connection of new generation capacity and loads, as well as to acquire servitudes.
A further R34-billion is required for refurbishments to the existing asset base and procurement of production equipment, as well as strategic spares.