Bleak winter of ongoing power cuts

File photo: Siphiwe Sibeko

File photo: Siphiwe Sibeko

Published Apr 19, 2015

Share

Johannesburg - Record low levels of electricity generation capacity this week may be a regular feature of the coming winter months, as Eskom pushes ahead with planned maintenance, according to energy expert Chris Yelland.

Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown said on Wednesday Eskom would depart from its usual practice of doing maintenance only in summer, when demand is lower, as it tries to restore the health of its ageing generating fleet by performing long-neglected maintenance in winter, despite the increased risk of load shedding.

Yelland said since the cold weather increased electricity demand and supply was already constrained, continuing maintenance, though necessary, would lead to more power cuts.

“Of course they’re constrained, because the more planned maintenance they do while we still have these high levels of outages, the more load shedding they have to do, so there’s this balancing act.

“There’s a lot of pressure on them, I’m sure, politically, economically, not to engage in load shedding but, on the other hand, if they don’t do it they won’t have enough space to do the maintenance.”

Yelland believed that even more planned maintenance, which currently removed between 4 500 and 5 000MW from the grid, was needed to catch up and restore the fleet to health.

High failure rates, thanks to deferred maintenance, have contributed to increased levels of unplanned outages in recent years, with as much as 9 500MW being lost this week, on top of the 5 000MW of planned maintenance, resulting in stage 3 load shedding on two consecutive days. “Previously, we had load shedding throughout the day. Now we’re seeing maybe some during the day and some in the evening. So it moves from stage 1 to stage 2, or 2 to 3,” Yelland said.

“That’s because of this change in the load pattern as we move into winter,” he said.

Yelland agreed with Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene, however, that the first few months of this year had been characterised by lower-than-anticipated levels of power cutting, potentially limiting the impact on the economy.

Nene shaved 0.4 percent off anticipated GDP growth in his February Budget, citing electricity constraints as a major contributor, but in a written reply to a parliamentary question from the DA’s Dion George this week he said a number of factors complicated attempts to calculate the precise impact on the economy.

“Load shedding and load curtailment has been far lower than initially anticipated at the time of the Budget,” Nene said in his reply, attributing this to depressed global demand, especially for commodities, which affects production in South Africa’s mining sector, and a “faster than anticipated reduction in unplanned outages”.

Yelland said he disagreed with Nene’s assessment that there were fewer unplanned outages.

“I don’t see any marked improvement at all.

“In fact, if anything, things are getting worse – if you look at this last week and the level of unplanned outages, (there were) around 10 000MW of unplanned and about 5 000MW of planned outages,” said Yelland.

“So I would say we haven’t seen a decrease or stabilisation yet of the unplanned break-downs and I’ve also been somewhat disappointed at the level of planned maintenance.”

He said a major contributing factor to lower levels of load shedding was the quicker-than-anticipated recovery of most of the Majuba power station’s capacity, following the collapse of a coal silo late last year.

“They put in place certain emergency measures to operate a number of these units – typically four of the six units could be operated on an emergency basis by putting in interim plans.

“That was perhaps better than initially hoped for, and may have had a positive impact,” Yelland said.

Nene also said households were hit harder by load shedding “as the first stage of demand reduction requires that electricity supply is cut to residential areas”.

This reduced the impact on the mining and manufacturing sectors.

But Yelland said, while it was true there was a new focus on residential users instead of heavy industry in an effort to mitigate the impact on the economy, this masked the damage being done to the commercial and business sectors.

“Embedded within the residential sector, within municipalities, is the commercial sector.

And the commercial sector, the reality is, produces far more per unit of energy… far more added value than the industrial sector.

“Heavy industry likes to give the impression that they are the ones that drive the economy and produce the goods, but the reality is that mining and industry have played an ever-decreasing role in the economy.

“The services, commercial and business sector, is playing a bigger role, certainly per unit of energy they consume.

“So, while you can shed some load in the domestic sector, it has a bigger effect on the economy,” said Yelland.

Political Bureau

Related Topics: