Cape Town - Eskom has warned that changes between the stages of load shedding will be more erratic due to the absence of the buffer normally provided by diesel generation capacity between generating unit breakdowns and South Africans will face stage 4 and 5 rolling blackouts this week.
The embattled utility on Sunday introduced stage 4 load shedding until 4pm on Monday.
Stage 5 load shedding will be implemented during the evenings from 4pm until midnight from Monday to Wednesday.
Load shedding will vary between stage 4 and stage 2 during the day until Wednesday, Eskom said.
“Changes in the stages of load shedding will be more erratic due to the absence of the buffer that is normally provided by the diesel generation capacity between generating unit breakdowns.”
On Friday a generating unit each at Kendal and Kriel power stations were taken offline for repairs.
Delays in returning to service a unit each at Arnot, Grootvlei, Hendrina and Tutuka power stations also contributed to the capacity constraints.
A generating unit each at Camden, Kriel, Tutuka and two units at Majuba power stations were returned to service.
Meanwhile, Eskom confirmed on Saturday that a suspect had been arrested after Eskom group chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer received a bomb threat from an unknown cellphone number in May.
On Friday morning a 27-year-old man was arrested in the Vosman area at eMalahleni, Mpumalanga. He remains in custody ahead of his court appearance.
“The internal Security Investigations team immediately preferred criminal charges on behalf of the Eskom group chief operating officer with the South African Police Service for investigation.
It was also established that the suspect used an unregistered SIM card to send the threatening message,” Eskom said.
Eskom general manager of security advocate Karen Pillay said other Eskom executives had also been targeted in recent months.
“Safety and security risks inadvertently impose increased demands on the organisation to secure its resources,” said Pillay.
University of Pretoria associate professor in the Department of Economics, Heinrich Bohlmann, said it had been clear for a while that sabotage had become a serious and difficult-to-solve problem for Eskom.
“The suspect was almost certainly not working alone and there are most likely more such cases out there that will need to be investigated,” Bohlmann said.
“Eskom has unfortunately become a lucrative business for tenderpreneurs, saboteurs, and other corrupt syndicates.
“This extends to the municipal level where cable theft and substation damage have cost local economies enormous amounts of money. If the motivation for the sabotage extends beyond money and greed is not clear at this stage, although it is not hard to see how certain fringe political groups may stand to benefit from a poorly performing Eskom.”
Bohlmann said load shedding would be a “continuous feature” of the economy for at least another three years.
University of Pretoria Graduate School of Technology Management Professor David Walwyn said it was the absence of management controls that resulted in Eskom becoming a target for criminals.
He said the present state of load shedding pointed to Eskom not being in control of the situation.
“We had load shedding in previous years, but already the amount of the load shed in energy is already more than double what we had in 2021 and that was bad enough. We are on track for exponential increases in load shedding. The underlying cause is that the new power stations are not working properly and the old ones are down for maintenance and repairs.
It’s clear Eskom is not in control of the situation.”
Peter Becker of the Koeberg Alert Alliance said the ambition to try to repair the coal fleet and get it back to 75% availability was an “unattainable fantasy”.
“The only way to get the coal fleet availability up is to shut down the less reliable plants.”
Cape Times