➤ Eskom keeps SA in the dark
A frustrating week of stage 2 load shedding for most of South Africa may last longer than expected as Eskom announced it would continue today after a brief respite last night.
The load shedding would continue despite the hoped for return to service of two generation units at Kusile power station, delayed because of apparent difficulties in restarting the units.
However, energy analyst Chris Yelland cautioned that this might not be the end of this bout of blackouts.
“Eskom has indicated, and this comes from the Eskom website so this is Eskom’s forecast and not my forecast, what they call ‘a high-risk probability of load shedding, every week for the next three months’.”
He added that this does not necessarily indicate that there will certainly be load shedding every week for three months, but that intermittent load shedding during the highlighted period was highly probable.
According to Yelland, there are ways to get around this. However, South Africa would have to look to someone other than government to be able to supply that generation capacity in the next few years.
This was because the state’s processes to increase electricity supply is simply too slow and filled with red tape.
“The government should simply get out of the way,” Yelland said, adding that private generation capacity by private customers and businesses could fill the void in the short term.
Citing an Eskom forecast, Yelland unpacked what Eskom called a “code red risk for load shedding”.
“It means they don’t have any so-called reserve generation capacity and any further loss of supply and generation units will result in load shedding,” Yelland told eNCA over the weekend.
Eskom noted in a statement its teams had successfully returned a generation unit each at the Kriel, Grootvlei and Duvha power stations to service.
“Despite Eskom’s stringent measures to manage the impact of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic on the operations, we are experiencing some impact on operations, including our suppliers,” the statement read.