Lack of fuel blamed for blackouts
Eskom says diesel supplier PetroSA cannot keep up with rising demand
THE lights have gone out and now Eskom says its diesel supplier — state entity PetroSA — has added to its woes.
There have been sporadic power outages and rolling blackouts around South Africa this weekend, and Eskom’s electricity supply over the next few days depends largely on frantic efforts to stockpile millions of litres of diesel.
The national grid has been under severe strain due to unplanned maintenance at power plants and the collapse of a coal silo at Majuba power station on November 1.
By lunchtime on Friday there was not enough diesel to prop up the wafer-thin reserve margin of available power, and all major municipalities have been asked to implement rolling blackouts as well.
Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger said: “The issue here is that ever since the Majuba incident we have been running the diesel generators very hard and putting a lot of pressure on our suppliers, PetroSA and Chevron. They have been basically pumped dry, not Chevron so much but certainly PetroSA. PetroSA is trying to get ships in.
“On a normal day we would have survived this but . . . we just ran out of diesel,” he said.
Eskom spent R10.5-billion on diesel fuel in 2013-14 to run these emergency plants.
Zama Luthuli, PetroSA vice president of corporate affairs, said yesterday that Eskom had been supplied “in excess of their normal requirements” of diesel.
“We’ve secured additional supply through imports and we expect the situation to normalise in the coming few days.”
Details have emerged of just how dire the power crisis was when the rolling blackouts started. South Africa had a total generating capacity of 42 000 megawatts of electricity. By the end of the week the country had lost 33% of that capacity due to:
Planned maintenance shaving 3 500MW off the grid;
Unplanned maintenance and events, including the Majuba silo collapse, costing another 5 000MW; and
Partial load losses, due to factors such as poor coal quality and power stations producing less due to high ambient temperatures, adding up to another 3 500MW loss.
But the final straw was when open cycle turbine plants — normally used at times of peak power demand — started running low on diesel, resulting in losses of a further 2 000MW.
Eskom wants customers to use electricity sparingly. Supply was “expected to be constrained for the foreseeable future”.
More than 60 Joburg suburbs, including Bryanston, Auckland Park and Jukskei Park, have been plunged into darkness for hours. Reasons range from theft of cables to vandalism, illegal connections and ageing infrastructure.
Yesterday, Joburg’s southern suburbs of Linmeyer, Kenilworth, Steeldale and Tulisa Park were among those affected as stage two of load-shedding was implemented.
Parts of Centurion and Arcadia in Pretoria and Umhlanga Rocks in Durban were also affected. Most Cape Town suburbs suffered the same fate intermittently.
Ekurhuleni’s spokesman, Themba Gadebe, said the municipality, which started implementing load-shedding on Friday between 1pm and 9pm, was advised by Eskom to continue with it yesterday.
Various suburbs in Durban are scheduled to have power outages. today. The crowd was cheerful and music was rocking at the Unite 2.0 Nelson Mandela Sport and Culture Day Color Run, a ‘celebration of health and happiness’ at the Union Buildings in Pretoria yesterday. A 5km walk was followed by a music festival DELIA Adonis says she watched with astonishment when a teenage model allegedly urinated on the head of a taxi driver in January.
The culprit then said he did not “see anything wrong with urinating on top of a black person”.
Adonis never imagined that months later, she would fall victim to a similar attack at the hands of young men.
Adonis, 52, was on Friday afternoon nursing her physical and emotional bruises. She said on October 17 she was attacked