‘No quick-fix after 15 years of failure at Eskom’

AS FED-UP South Africans gear up to march to the country-wide offices of the National Energy Regulator (Nersa), Eskom and the ANC over the load shedding crisis, Eskom board chairperson Mpho Makwana rubbed salt into the wounds by warning the country should prepare for the possibility of permanent load shedding of at least Stage 2 or 3 for the next two years.

Makwana was providing an update on Sunday on Eskom’s system challenges and plant performance recovery plan, which was in its final stages of being approved.

Eskom’s coal fleet has been the subject of much debate and critique as rolling blackouts have worsened.

The comprehensive Generation Recovery Plan was announced in the National Energy Crisis Committee’s (Neccom) six-month progress update on the implementation of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Energy Action Plan, which was released on Saturday after a six-month silence following it being established on July 25 last year.

The plan identified six power stations that, with oversight from the new Eskom board and independent experts over the coming months, would get better reliability and availability of its units.

Makwana said the execution of the recovery plan required that power stations be given space to execute it.

“This requires either adding additional capacity to create space to do proper maintenance without firefighting, or create some predictability by implementing permanent Stage 2 or 3 load shedding for the next two years while giving the country a level of predictability or consistency to plan their livelihoods better,” Makwana said.

Makwana said the reality was that the recovery of Eskom’s coal fleet would not be achieved within a short term, and it would take at least two years to improve the energy availability factor (EAF) from the current 58% to 70% by March 31, 2025.

In Neccom’s update, the president said no new plans were needed and they were focusing on implementing his Energy Action Plan fully to effectively achieve energy security.

The committee, together with the Eskom board and management, agreed that the declining EAF of Eskom’s fleet reflected the cumulative impact of historical underinvestment in maintenance and assets, exacerbated by flaws in the design of new power stations in the past decade.

Outgoing Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter said: “The EAF over the past weeks has reached new lows, a lot of it is attributed to the failure of three units at Kusile as well as extremely high levels of planned maintenance that we have carried out. This planned maintenance is vital to restore the integrity of our system.

“The capacity available from the Eskom system is likely to remain constrained and supply is likely to remain tight for the whole of 2023.

He confirmed Neccom’s statement that an estimated 9,200MW of embedded generation projects were already in the pipeline and registered with Nersa at various stages of completion.

“When these projects are added to the grid – the first is expected to start feeding into the grid by the end of this year – we will see a meaningful difference being made to the supply situation.

“Although the stages of load shedding have been high and for extended periods, this does not indicate that the power system is approaching a blackout,” De Ruyter added.

In response to the updates, the DA’s energy spokesperson, Kevin Mileham, said: “The DA has repeatedly called for a ring-fenced state of disaster around Eskom and the electricity sector to facilitate the release of disaster management funding and enable the speedy implementation of the necessary regulatory changes that would allow additional generation capacity to be rapidly installed.”

Mileham said the ANC government has, for the past week, been telling the country “outright lies to the effect that load shedding will be a thing of the past”, and the DA rejected this unrelenting punishment of ordinary citizens.

He said this was the central motivation behind the DA’s planned national shutdown on Wednesday when the party would be marching to Luthuli House, the ANC headquarters.

The party is also planning to protest in Cape Town at noon on Wednesday, from the Grand Parade to the ANC’s provincial offices in Adderley Street.

GOOD Party general secretary Brett Herron said the hard reality was that there was no quick-fix to 15 years of failure to deal with load shedding in a coherent and urgent manner.

“Now we need the current fleet of power stations to be operational as they were designed to be. This is the most urgent task.

“The procurement of additional power from IPPs, including renewables, must proceed according to the president’s commitments but these projects will only bring relief in 18 to 24 months’ time. Eskom has the monopoly on the supply of electricity. It’s Eskom’s duty to fix that supply and ensure stability. We’re tired of excuses,” Herron said.

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba said the statement that the country should expect load shedding for the next two years was “ludicrous” and pointed out that there still was no coherent plan to stop nearly 15 years after load shedding.