Riyaz Patel
The board at state-owned electricity utility Eskom has sanctioned a proposal to migrate the group’s unreliable coal fleet to a ‘philosophy maintenance’ model, whereby generation units are serviced in strict adherence with prescribed maintenance schedules in a bid to break the cycle of unplanned breakdowns.
However, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter said Friday that the new model would increase the risk of load-shedding for the coming 18 months at least, but would also improve the longer-term performance of the fleet.
He said implementing load-shedding is not a decision that Eskom takes lightly, but that it’s unavoidable.
Eskom has, since September 2019, implemented 21 days of load-shedding. The utility is set to continue with stage 2 load-shedding over the weekend until 6am Monday morning.
On December 9, Eskom was forced to declare Stage 6, or 6 000 MW of simultaneous cuts, for the first time in its 96-year history.
De Ruyter,
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