Winter not as cold as expected: Eskom boss on lower stages of load-shedding

Winter is not as cold as expected, says Eskom, hence South Africans are enjoying more electricity than they have for most of the year.

Acting Eskom GCEO Calib Cassim told parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) that apart from the power utility doing less maintenance in winter, when it produced its outlook for the season it expected much colder weather. “The warmer the winter, the better for us," said Cassim.

He added that key to generation is that the energy availability factor (EAF) is an outcome of how unplanned outages are controlled.

These have consistently been in the region of 17,000MW to 18,000MW over the past 12 to 18 months.

Eskom tried to keep unplanned outages to 15,000MW or lower and what happened in the past two-and-a-half weeks was a move away from that trend, with unplanned outages in the region of 15,000MW and 16,000MW, which is helping a lot, Cassim said.

“That gives us about 2,000MW to 3,000MW more and that is why the EAF is up.

“If you look at the peak of what we are currently experiencing, we just need to keep the momentum going as there is no load-shedding in the morning and stage 3 (later). Had we not reduced the unplanned outages by 2,000MW to 3,000MW, you would be sitting at stage 6 in the peak."

Cassim added that Eskom was focusing on keeping unplanned outages between 15,000MW and 15,500MW and below, but the challenge would come in summer when more maintenance was required.

Some short-term maintenance was being done despite it being winter, with 6,000MW concluded at the weekend.

“We had an opportunity to even drop stages lower, but rather than dropping to stage 2 and then going up to stage 4 and 5 in the week, (we decided) to keep the consistency and predictability for the system and citizens of the country. So that is the big focus from a generation perspective.”