A series of breakdowns, heavy rains deepen the crisis at Eskom
Energy availability of 53.8% sees utility implement Stage 4 load shedding
SOUTH Africa’s energy crisis deepened further over the weekend as Eskom’s generating capacity was battered by breakdowns of five generating units, while heavy rains in the east of Mpumalanga and the Vaal left coal stockpiles temporarily unusable.
This electricity supply capacity was in spite of Eskom burning at least 2.4 million litres of diesel per day last week at its emergency Open-Cycle Gas Turbines to keep the lights on.
The power utility on Saturday implemented Stage 4 load shedding indefinitely, following the breakdown of a generating unit each at Koeberg, Medupi, Kriel, Arnot and Lethabo power stations.
Eskom’s energy availability factor (EAF) has deteriorated further and is currently at 53.8%.
It is anticipated to increase when some units return to service, but other units must be taken out for maintenance in the coming month.
Eskom’s head of generation, Thomas Conradie, on Friday admitted that reaching the target of 60% EAF by the end of March “will be very difficult” and would require Eskom to bring total unplanned losses down to around 13 500MW.
This comes amid a significant number of units – about 4 700MW of plant in total – that are running, but are at risk.
Conradie said the long spell of heavy rains had affected Eskom’s stockpiles of dry coal reserves, resulting in some increases in partial load losses.
He said Eskom would either need to run units at lower loads or run some at part-load to deal with constraints due to the wet coal.
“Given that, we have still seen that our total unplanned unavailability is hovering around quite high 17 000 megawatts, hence that we are still forced to to continue applying Stage 3 load shedding during day times, and then also escalate towards Stage 4 over the evening peak,” Conradie said.
“But the situation is such that we have been dispatching diesel quite hard
over this past week also, and equally also using our pump storage. We are burning (diesel) fairly hard, especially this period when we also had a considerable amount of partial load losses.
“To give you an idea, in the last seven days we have burned 17 million litres of diesel between Gourikwa and Ankerlig open-cycle gas plants.”
Conradie was updating the media with the head of the National Energy Crisis Committee in the Presidency, Rudi Dicks, on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan.
He also warned that diesel reserves would become strained due to a marked increase in demand as the country approaches the new work week.
“In terms of diesel reserves, we have got adequate off-site storage and off-site diesel available at the Ankerlig and also at Gourikwa, where we are currently busy offloading a shipment of diesel that has arrived,” Conradie said.
“But our on-site diesel levels are a bit low, so we need to also utilise this opportunity over the weekend to transfer diesel from the off-site storage to the on-site storage in order to be well set up for the coming week.”
During the briefing, Dicks said that Eskom had received approval to be exempted from the new generation regulations, which will allow the utility to do emergency procurement and a number of other interventions.
Dicks said the government was excited about the announcements that will be made by the finance minister during his budget speech on Wednesday in support of rooftop solar PV installations.
“We don’t have to be sold on this in any particular way, we know that this is one of the quickest ways to try and ensure that we get both households and businesses off the grid, or partially off the grid, to be able to alleviate and that’s going to be an important part of you of course,” Dicks said.
“Now, the success of that is depending on whether these incentives or subsidies or any form of fiscal support that’s there.”