Johannesburg - Eskom has lost more power to breakdowns but is still hopeful of avoiding load shedding. The power grid alerts were on red on Monday, indicating “severe strain” on the grid, but today’s public holiday should bring some relief with lowered demand.
“The power system is currently constrained but stable, but the risk of load shedding is low for this week and the rest of the festive season,” said Eskom in its regular system status bulletin last night.
“However, due to the underlying shortage of additional generating capacity, the power system remains vulnerable – meaning that any extra load or faults in the system may necessitate the need to implement load shedding.
“With many industries winding down their business for the festive season, coupled with the return to service of some of our power generating units and building up of our emergency reserves, Eskom is cautiously confident that it will not have to implement load shedding during this period.
“We will use this period of low electricity demand to intensify our plant maintenance programme.”
Eskom has previously said it does not expect to have to load-shed again until possibly the second week in January, when industry returns to work.
Monday night’s bulletin records a total of 12 338MW offline for fixing.
This is 4 722MW off on planned repairs and 7 616MW off due to breakdowns.
The total for breakdowns is more than 1 000MW more than the situation at the end of last week, when there was more than 6 528MW off due to breakdowns, giving a total offline of 11 643MW.
However, the situation is still better than Monday last week, when Eskom started the week with about 8 700MW offline because of breakdowns.
That planned maintenance brought the offline total at the time to nearly 13 800MW, meaning about a third of the grid was offline.
That day, the utility listed 14 generating units that were out across 10 power stations, totalling more than 6 000MW, which it promised to get back online before the end of the month.
Within 24 hours, Eskom reported having repaired five of those units and dropped the total offline to 11 643MW.
“Eskom continues to make progress with its programme of planned maintenance but the system remains tight,” Eskom said on Monday. It reiterated the call for everyone to cut electricity usage by 10 percent.
“This will make it significantly easier to manage the power system during this challenging time, while also enabling us to do planned maintenance to ensure the reliability of our plant.”
Despite the holiday slowdown, the grid remains tight because of the higher than usual maintenance and repairs.
Today’s public holiday is expected to provide the week’s biggest breathing space, with spare capacity predicted to total more than 3 000MW, while darkness looms on Friday night with more maintenance planned and the grid’s spare capacity expected to be less than 100MW.
Eskom urged those going on holiday to unplug appliances like TVs, coffee machines and computers, and to switch off geysers, check back-up batteries on security systems and set pool pumps to run for just four hours a day.
The Star