Its quarterly budget on diesel
on at all costs ahead of highly contested general elections on 29 May.
This is the longest period without power cuts since 2021. Over the festive season (15 December 2023 to 2 January 2024) South Africa experienced 18 straight days without loadshedding, following a 20-day streak in the winter of 2022.
Eskom insiders this week told the M&G that the utility’s diesel costs were edging towards R7 billion within the first month, with one official who declined to be named linking this to political pressure related to the elections.
“We have been drawing from everything now. The questions the media should have asked the minister [Ramokgopa] is if indeed the system was functioning as well as they are, why then are we overdrawing from our hydro plant and overusing the OCGT?” they said.
In January, the utility denied being under pressure to suspend loadshedding ahead of the vote, telling the M&G: “Eskom has no plan to suspend load-shedding during elections’ month since load-shedding is not implemented as a selective response but as a response to protect the grid from collapse. Load-shedding can only be suspended if supply meets the country’s electricity demand.”
This week, Eskom senior manager Eric Shunmagum said the utility had probably exceeded its budget allocation for diesel, adding that the numbers would be announced at the next media briefing.
Former Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter, who left the utility acrimoniously in 2023 after alleging corrupt political interference in its running, told a conference this week that the only reason load-shedding had abated was because diesel was being burnt at a very fast rate.
“The budget for this year for diesel is R24 billion. That’s four times what we had at our disposal. So if the lights are on, well done. But they’re on because we are pouring money into diesel at a rate of knots,” he said.
Energy analyst Tshepo Kgadima said it was questionable that Eskom was drawing excessive megawatts of energy from diesel and 1000MW from its hydro plant this week despite achieving a 65% energy availability factor. “The situation in the power plants is not as rosy as they announce it to be. If you have an EAF of over 60%, then there is no need to draw so much energy because you have a surplus.”
Eskom’s diesel expenditure came under fire last week after Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan, in a parliamentary response to the Democratic Alliance (DA), said the utility had spent R65 billion in a five-year period.
DA public enterprises spokesperson Mimmy Gondwe said this equated to more than R1billion of diesel spending a month over five years.
“Burning copious amounts of diesel at such unprecedented levels is unsustainable and partly explains why consumers were hit with double digit tariff increases by Nersa.
“This means that consumers are being asked to subsidise Eskom’s failures as the entity burns more diesel to maintain an illusion of improving power supply. With this latest revelation, Minister Ramokgopa’s claim that Eskom has turned a corner is completely false because burning diesel can never be a permanent solution to the load-shedding crisis.”