LISTEN | Call to delay planned maintenance comes back to haunt Eskom

Eskom's decision to slow down planned maintenance ahead of winter has come back to haunt it as the country was plunged back to higher levels of load-shedding over the past few days.

The utility was forced to ramp up repairs or risk the faster deterioration of units.

On Sunday and Monday, Eskom announced that load-shedding would be ramped up to stage 5 and then 6 due to “the necessary increase in generation planned maintenance, from an average of 3,000MW in June to an average of 6,000MW in September, coupled with the recent multiple generation unit failures”. 

Planned maintenance was 6,287MW on Sunday and 5,894MW on Monday, while breakdowns of generating capacity stood at 16,210MW.

Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, with Eskom head of generation Bheki Nxumalo, on Tuesday provided an update “on the performance of the electricity grid”.

Both confirmed that stage 6 was due to the ramping up of planned maintenance and issues around unplanned capacity loss factor (UCFL) — the number of units that are failing.

Ramokgopa explained the options Eskom had and the risks and benefits associated with each.

“The first one is that you allow the units to run, so you are exploiting these units and assets so they continue to generate gigawatts. You also don't subscribe or honour philosophy maintenance, you delay your planned maintenance and of course there is a short-term gain. A short-term gain is that you are able to extract as many megawatts as possible and, therefore, you are going to undermine the intensity of load-shedding. 

“The risks of that approach over the long-term, you find that you're going to rapidly deteriorate the units. The units at some point are going to fail, and when they do, you have to do a deeper root cause analysis and this will take you an extraordinary amount of time to return them to service,” he said.

Philosophy maintenance relates to the plan set out by the manufacturer of the equipment when this will be carried out.

On the second — and preferred — option, Ramokgopa said: “Allow yourself to stick to planned maintenance [even with] the units that are at risk. Even if they are generating the MW that are necessary to help us stave off load-shedding, you take them out. So essentially, you're ramping up planned maintenance. The upside of that is that you are introducing greater levels of resilience in the system. 

“As a team, we've taken the view that part of where we are as a country in relation to the deterioration of the generating capacity is that we have not been sticking to planned maintenance or philosophy maintenance.”

One of the reasons for delaying maintenance was a decision taken ahead of winter to slow down on planned maintenance because Eskom had done “some degree of intense planned maintenance” ahead of the season, he said.

Another was due to Eskom's “severely compromised” balance sheet and that the utility had “little resources to invest in maintenance”.

This changed when Eskom was given “fiscal relief” of R254bn, with certain conditions. One of these was that it invest heavily in maintenance

Nxumalo reiterated the necessity of carrying out planned maintenance and that the country could expect lower levels of load-shedding from the end of the week.

This is due to the expected return of units at Tutuka station, which he said had been part of the “problematic units” over winter and the recovery of reserves.

“So that is also part of the plan that we have as a cushion as we are increasing the maintenance. There are units that have been off for quite some time, that we need to come back now. That is at Tutuka and Kusile and this will help us increase that gap so that we go back to lower stages of load-shedding that we have seen through the winter period,” he said.

“Towards the end of the week, we should be in a position to start reducing the stages from stage 6. And also we would've recovered on our reserve. You'll see that the pump storage is starting to recover as well.”

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