Johnathan Paoli
Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has praised the hard work of technicians and the leadership of the state power utility in ensuring the continued suspension of load shedding and the additional capacity the country was currently enjoying.
Briefing the media on the implementation of the energy action plan on Monday, the Minister said South Africa was enjoying 40 days without power cuts because of the repairs and maintenance over the last year.
“Over the past few weeks, there has been a consistent and significant improvement in curbing unplanned outages – technically known as the Unplanned Capacity Loss Factor (UCLF) – due to the success of the Generation Operational Recovery plan which commenced in March 2023,” he said.
Ramokgopa reiterated his dismissal of claims that the long period of no load shedding was being utilised as a tool for the upcoming elections.
“There is no correlation between this performance and the date of the 29th of May. When the team were making these efforts, when we ramped up planned maintenance in December and January, little did we know that there would be a big date,” the minister said.
Ramokgopa said that no political motives were behind the improvement and that it was an orchestrated effort and engineering feat by the employees of Eskom.
He said that there has been a sustained recovery of five percentage points over April in comparison to last year, and that illustrated the achievements of the utility, and not a political agenda linked to the date of elections.
“This is a result of process mapping, in engineering terms, the stabilization of management ensuring that we use and deploy this fiscal injection received from National Treasury, identifying candidate stations that can give us the best returns in a short space of time,” Ramokgopa said.
At the start of the month of May, Ramokgopa praised the achievement of an Energy Availability Factor (EAF) of 65,5% – last attained in 2021 – and said it confirmed the success of the “aggressive maintenance-led recovery strategy”.
He said that despite its inherent risks, which he referred to as “short-term pain for long-term gain”, the milestone validated the viability of ESKOM’s fleet of Generation units and signified the most efficient path to ending load shedding in the country.
“With the proven success of this performance, the focus now shifts to maintaining and enhancing it. We have indeed turned the corner, the ending of load shedding is within touching distance,” Ramokgopa said.
The Electricity Minister announced the return of the Medupi unit 4 (800MW), Koeberg unit 2 (980 MW) and the synchronisation of Kusile unite 6 (800MW), totaled a generation capacity addition of 2580 MW for the next 6 months; and said that the orchestrated improvements and new capacity meant the country had breached peak load shedding.
Eskom sent a special appreciation on Sunday to the Power Station General Managers and their teams who the utility thanked for working diligently to ensure the recovery of additional generating capacity by bringing units from unplanned outages and planned maintenance back into service as soon as possible.
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