'Load-shedding not due to sabotage' — electricity minister

Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has reassured South Africans that the recent implementation of load-shedding is not due to sabotage but technical issues.

He promised that the electricity supply will stabilise by the end of the week.

Eskom implemented stage six load-shedding in the early hours of Sunday due to multiple unit trips and maintenance.

“The evidence that is before us is that this is a technical issue and we are going to explain it. I'm making this point because we must not find any reason to manufacture explanations of why we are at stage six and point fingers somewhere else,” Ramokgopa said.

The minister was confident that by the end of the week Eskom would be out of the “difficult situation”.

“The outlook going forward, we are confident we are going to go to conditions of normality. What are those conditions of normality? — that by the end of the week there will not be load-shedding,” he said.

Ramokgopa said “there is no sabotage”, emphasing that they were aware of and able to explain what went wrong.

“And in fact, it's something that we are going to be addressing.”

Ramokgopa said five generation units were lost at the Majuba power station in Mpumalanga.

“So it means when we lost those five units that generate 600 megawatts we lost about 3,000 megawatts and that also triggered a series of events — which also affected the Medupi unit number two, taking out an additional 800 megawatts.”

He said on Saturday, 3,000 megawatts were lost at Majuba, resulting in Eskom initiating stage three load-shedding to replenish the reserves.

Another incident at Camden in the early hours it caused four units at the power station to be lost, which resulted in the ramping up to stage six.

Eskom group CEO, Dan Marokane confirmed that the country was pushed into stage three load-shedding on Saturday due to the loss of multiple units at the Majuba power station.

He explained that this was initially triggered by a transformer overload caused by the start-up of a unit returning from a long-term outage.

“That essentially started the domino effect of reticulation supply cutting to the rest of the units and, one by one, those units gave in, essentially — more to do with the support of power to the compressors for both systems in the units.

“We have understood the exact nature of how the event came about, and we can isolate it overnight and start addressing it,” Marokane said.

He said in the coming week, they will delve deeper into strengthening system design to prevent such occurrences in the future. Additionally, they will assess other potential risks within their fleet.

Morokane said at Camden power station in Ermelo, a failure was experienced on an hydraulic valve which led to other units also being lost.

“This is an area where we've been doing some work. We've done some interventions last November, and we have plans to essentially address that adequately going forth,” he said. 

He said the trip at Medupi had to do with the under-frequency in the network overall. 

“That pushed that unit at Medupi itself into a position where it trips. So they are all interrelated to some extent,” Marokane said.

He said they had to implement stage three load-shedding “to build and protect the demand and build the capacity for us to preserve the reserves, which we've been using quite extensively in the week.

“At 1am when the Camden situation unfolded, we had to escalate the level of load-shedding because that meant that we were going to have to run the reserves much harder, and that would have presented problems in terms of our recovery today and the recovery before the beginning of a week.”

Marokane said of the 10 units lost overnight, six had been returned to service.

Two more units at Majuba were expected to be returned to service on Sunday.

“So we should have all of the power station units that are available back in operation, and we'll proceed up to Tuesday to bring the rest of the Camden units back in operation.

“We should be able to take a view around stepping down from the level of stage six load-shedding by tomorrow, and we will on a basis of the actual recovery itself make a call, and the recovery of our reserves make a call in terms of how we step down, stepwise, to a point where we have paused load-shedding for the remainder of the week. So this week is very important,” Marokane said.

He said the first three days were very crucial in their recovery programme.

“We are encouraged by the overnight recovery. We are clear with the plans that need to be delivered for the rest of today. We'll take stock this evening and do the assessments in terms of how we step down.”

Ramokgopa assured the country his ministry would do whatever necessary to eliminate load-shedding as a structural constraint.

“We are confident that the actions we have taken over the past 16 months are pointing us in the right direction, and we've accepted, that there are going to be moments of setbacks, and this is exactly that moment. We take full responsibility. We take full accountability,' Ramokgopa said.

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