Eskom will be incentivising staff members who have been hard at work to keep the lights on despite a continued forecast of blackouts.
This is the third out of Eskom’s top five priorities in dealing with the energy crisis, Eskom board member Mteto Nyati said on Thursday.
Speaking during an update on the electricity challenges, he said the incentives, such as salary increases and promotions, will be performance-based to boost better behaviour among staff.
“We have a number of employees in Eskom who are doing a good job. If you treat them the same way as people who are not applying themselves, you have a problem and have people with low morale. We need to give management the tools they need to drive the behaviour we are looking for ... and the tools they need to differentiate based on performance,” he said.
Load-shedding will be lowered to stage 4 on Friday from 5am until Saturday morning. Stage 3 will be implemented until 5am on Sunday morning.
The blackouts will then be suspended until 4pm when stage 2 will be rolled out.
Head of generation Thomas Conradie said there are still high levels of unreliability and unpredictability when it comes to the breakdown of units.
“Some days we can have two units lost, and the other day it will be four or five units lost, which creates a difficulty in having adequate capacity. We have been underinvesting and undermaintaining our plants for a considerable number of years in the past due to funding for maintenance, the increasing shortage of capacity and units not being available to do planned maintenance. There are a thousand issues that make the plants unreliable.”
Elements of sabotage were, however, not prevalent, he said.
“There are elements but very remotely in terms of units being unavailable as a result of interference to the plants, but that is much more the exception than the rule,” said Conradie.
TimesLIVE
Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.