Load shedding not new normal, says defiant De Ruyter
Despite the nation’s mood being one of “misery”, as one Eskom executive termed it yesterday, the utility’s top management is confident that load shedding will be limited in the coming winter months.
This is mainly due to the fact that three large generators will return from maintenance outages between now and the end of next month.
Two units at Kusile Power Station (1 600MW) are expected back online in the “next few weeks” while Koeberg Unit 2 (920MW) is scheduled to return from its refuelling and maintenance outage by the late June/ early July, according to Eskom CEO André de Ruyter.
Eskom also generally sees better performance from its coal fleet in winter months when temperatures are lower.
And because the demand profile looks quite different in winter, with far steeper morning and evening peaks, when there is a generation shortfall load shedding will likely only be required during those times.
This is consistent with what was seen in this week, with load shedding between 5pm and 10pm daily since Monday.
De Ruyter was defiant on Wednesday, saying: “We should not accept load shedding as the new normal” and that he and his executives “are seized with the matter”.
Key to turning around the coal fleet is the 4 000MW to 6 000MW of new generation capacity that needs to be brought on stream “yesterday”.
Chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer highlighted that this was his answer to President Cyril Ramaphosa in their first meeting on 11 December, 2019.
Not a single megawatt has been added to the grid under Ramaphosa’s administration.
While there has been some movement, no new projects have reached financial close, and some never will, as the investment cases no longer make sense.
This new capacity will give Eskom the headroom it needs to do proper maintenance on its ageing fleet. Until then, it can’t – as it is forced to operate units that should not be running.
The winter base case scenario of the utility’s transmission unit saw no load shedding, with only R1 billion spent on diesel for the open-cycle gas turbines until August.
Segomoco Scheppers, Eskom’s managing director for transmission, admitted yesterday afternoon that clearly this is no longer the case. Since 1 April, the country has seen more than 10 days of load shedding.
This base scenario is predicated on up to 12 000MW of capacity being unavailable due to outages.
On Monday, as it announced stage 2 load shedding in the evening peak, Eskom said 15 943MW was unavailable due to breakdowns, on Tuesday this was 15 762MW, and on Wednesday it said this was 15 988MW.
While outages ought to improve in the coming months and planned maintenance is deliberately reduced to levels below 3 000MW, it is not likely that the base case is realistic for the whole of winter.