Pretoria - Eskom CEO André de Ruyter said on Wednesday that South Africa was nowhere near a total system blackout, and warned people of spreading falsehoods on the country’s power crisis.
“We are quite a long away from a total system blackout or a collapse. The terminology is quite important when we talk about a blackout versus load shedding. It might sound like semantics but it does actually matter, to be precise in the terminology that we use when we discuss these things,” De Ruyter spoke to journalists.
“We have this tool at our disposal, of load shedding. We do have significant buffer capacity still in the load shedding system before we approximate even close to a total system blackout.”
He said a total system blackout would mean a stage 8 load shedding level. South Africa is currently under stage 4 load shedding.
“We still have headroom in the system to allow us to avoid a total blackout. I would caution against speculation in this regard. I would caution against fear-mongering, stoking of speculation and fear in this regard. We do have plans in place,” said De Ruyter.
“We have the capability of recovering and we do not anticipate this as a credible risk at this point in time. Of course we need more capacity on the grid, as urgently as we can, to give us that additional safety margin that one needs to cater for the unpredictability and unreliability of our generation system.”
On Tuesday, the embattled power utility said the current bout of load shedding would probably be suspended by Friday.
“We believe that we will be in a position to assess on Thursday evening. Obviously, demand tends to drop on Friday, so probably if things improve, we will then assess on Friday morning (regarding) when we should be stopping,” said Eskom group executive for generation Phillip Dukashe at a media briefing.
“At this stage, best case is that we will be stopping load shedding some time during Friday. That also depends on how we can replenish our reserves because that is important. As we prepare for the start of the next week, we would like to have all our diesel and all our pump storage in a healthy state.”
On Tuesday morning, Eskom announced it would be implementing stage 4 load shedding.
In an alert, Eskom said this followed the tripping of its generation units at Majuba Unit 5 and Tutuka Unit 4.
IOL