Staff reporter
Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Tuesday he cannot say how much longer load-shedding will last due to the complexity of the problems at Eskom.
The recent spate of power cuts by Eskom has negatively affected small businesses and impacted economic growth.
Gordhan apologised to the country for the continuous power outages, after Eskom implemented Stage 2 and Stage 4 load-shedding last week.
“I want to appeal to all of us to understand the nature of the challenges we have,” Gordhan said.
“We understand the frustration. We don’t have the magic formula. This is not about whether Pravin Gordhan or Jabu Mabuza or Phakamani Hadebe single-handedly have a magic wand that can actually enable us to wave that wand and say load-shedding is over.”
Gordhan was flanked by Eskom chairperson Jabu Mabuza, Eskom CEO Phakamani Hadebe and Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer.
The power utility supplies more than 90 percent of the power in South Africa, but has suffered repeated faults at its coal-fired power stations, along with low water levels at hydroelectric plants, diesel shortages and loss of imports from Mozambique.
Around 17,000 megawatts of Eskom’s installed capacity of 45,000 megawatts was unavailable, Gordhan said.
“Engineers are visiting the power stations themselves to give us an independent view of what is going wrong and how quickly we can repair what is going wrong,” Gordhan told journalists.
“We need to complete these investigations, and we will come back to you in the next 10 to 14 days.”
Eskom has continuously implemented power cuts since Thursday, with up to 4,000 megawatts cut from the grid on a rotational basis.
The power cuts have disrupted businesses, particularly small and medium-sized firms, and has also prompted frustrations among ordinary people ahead of the elections in May.
Apart from faults at the new Medupi and Kusile mega power plants, three other coal-fired plants were suffering severe problems, Eskom executives said.
The executives also said Eskom was expecting to receive a diesel shipment on Friday to replenish its fuel supplies.
Eskom burns diesel when it cannot produce enough from its coal plants.
Gordhan said more technicians have also been assigned to Mozambique to manage the cut in power supply to South Africa.
Eskom briefed Gordhan at the weekend about the collapse of the power supply imported from Cahora Bassa due to Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, and a large number of tube failures and breakdowns at local coal-fired power stations.
Eskom showed a slide in its presentation indicating that the average power station was 37-years-old.
“Primarily due to financial and capacity constraints, much of the refurbishment could not be executed between 2008 and 2014 as Eskom focused on keeping the lights on,” said Hadebe. Eskom will spend an extra R7-billion on power station maintenance.
“If you look at the maintenance that has been undertaken in the past 10 years, it has deteriorated, so you have the risk where you have more power stations on the one side, whereas on the other side the maintenance has been decreasing,” Hadebe said.
“About 10 years back, the maintenance budget was about R37-billion. That has since decreased to about R10-billion. In dealing with current challenges, we are putting in another R7-billion.”
Mabuza said the power utility was struggling to get new power plants working to replace older ones … “in the past five years in particular, up to February 2018”.
He said there would be an investigation into what had happened to the money that should have been spent on maintenance.
“The question has to be: what was that money spent on? That is an issue that is being pursued through the law-enforcement agencies,” Mabuza said.
“The plants that were [recently] built have not come on stream fully and the partial commercial availability of those plants has not been sufficient to produce the required electricity.”
Mabuza said load-shedding was Eskom’s last resort.
“This pain, this discomfort that we’re going through is unfortunately what we need to do so that we can fix the broken equipment,” he said.
Additional reporting by agencies
