SA may enjoy load-shedding-free summer but Eskom’s ‘likely scenario’ is stage 1

South Africans may enjoy a continued run of no load-shedding during the summer season — that's if unplanned outages hover below 13,000MW.

If they hover at about 14,000MW, the country may experience stage 1 power cuts for 21 days at most.

In the worst-case scenario, where unplanned outages hover at about 15,000MW, Eskom predicts 115 days of stage 2 load-shedding.

It's the stage 1 scenario that Eskom is pinning its hopes on as it revealed its summer outlook and state of the business at a media briefing at its Megawatt Park office on Monday.

The summer outlook runs from September 1 to March 31.

Eskom group CEO Dan Marokane was joined by the heads of generation, transmission and distribution — Bheki Nxumalo, Monde Bala and Segomoco Scheppers respectively — as well as CFO Calib Cassim and board chairperson Mteto Nyati.

South Africa has enjoyed 152 days of no load-shedding and reflecting on this, an upbeat Marokane said: “When we began this journey, we had a number of speculators in terms of what would've been behind this. We took a view at the time and continue to hold that view. There's nothing dramatic about what you're seeing.

“All of this is a convergence of calculated moves, deliberate interventions,” he said.

Marokane said ending load-shedding was just the “first step” in their journey to “building an organisation that will be able to pivot into the new, reformed electricity industry”.

Presenting the outlook, Marokane said there had been a “structural shift” in the performance of Eskom's coal fleet, which had resulted in a reduction in unplanned outages.

“Coming to the key message for today, as far as the summer outlook is concerned, we have changed two things. On the back of the structural shift in performance, we have reduced the base assumption as far as the unplanned outages are concerned going into the summer.

“We are now premising our base case on a scenario of 13,000MW of unplanned losses. This is in contrast to the 14,000 and 15,000MW in the last two updates that we had shared. It is against this backdrop that our view is that, if we keep unplanned losses below 13,000MW, we should have a load-shedding free summer.

“At worst, we anticipate that in an unlikely event that escalation of unplanned losses reach up to 15,500MW, we'll at most experience stage 2.

“The key message is that the performance over the last four months has consistently hovered about 12,000[MW in unplanned losses] and our power station managers and teams are very alive to this and their focus is on controlling unplanned losses.”

Marokane confirmed plans to bring in generating capacity from Medupi unit 4 and Kusile unit 6 over the next few months, as well as a “second unit ... that is going through its long-term operation programme”.

“That 2,500MW will add significant margins to our reserves and once we have that, together with the sustained performance we're seeing, we should get into a conversation in the year by March as to when we can essentially indicate that from our perspective, load-shedding at the chronic level that it was is behind us.”

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