Cape Town – Eskom has said that it has successfully performed the first part of its planned maintenance drive, with no load shedding since Friday, 24 April.
In a statement issued on Monday night, Eskom acting Chief Executive Mr Brian Molefe, said: “Eskom’s maintenance teams worked hard over the long-weekend and were able to perform planned maintenance on 2303 MW of generating plant.
“They further, also returned 1453 MW of generating capacity back to service over this period. The focus of the maintenance festival is to ensure long-term reliability of the plant as well as restore units that are currently offline due to technical faults.”
However, the power utility warned that the power system continued to remain significantly constrained and would be so for the rest of this week.
Eskom said it had used its emergency reserves, open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs) and pumped storage schemes to augment capacity while the maintenance drive was underway.
“We would like to thank all electricity users for responding to our message to save. Every little bit of saving counts in reducing the need to implement load shedding,” Molefe added.
ANA