South Africa has reached a milestone of 37 consecutive days without load shedding, but winter is coming.
Eskom anticipates limiting load shedding to Stage 2 during the colder months, with reduced unplanned outages expected to range from 14000 MW to 15500 MW and a maximum of 17000 MW of unplanned outages at Stage 5 load shedding.
This is a marked improvement from the previous year, the utility company said at a briefing last week.
In a strategic move to improve the reliability of our generation fleet for winter 2024, we consciously increased planned maintenance during the summer months of 2023/24 to an average of 8000 MW. The peak of planned maintenance was executed between December 2023 and January 2024, where we reached an average of 18% of the generation capacity. The last time we saw a similar surge in planned maintenance was around November and December 2020, said Eskom Group Chief Executive, Dan Marokane .
He added that Eskom would turn its attention to addressing contributors of the unreliability of [its] plants. Remaining within this range of unplanned outages will enable us to maintain load shedding at lower stages throughout the winter, Marokane said.
Eskom will continue to strategically use its peaking stations, including the open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs). These turbines are typically dispatched to meet the high electricity demand during the morning and evening peaks.
As far as the OCGTs are concerned, the system operator (SO) strives to operate them for the shortest possible duration, especially as our coal generation fleet becomes more reliable. Compared to April 2023, we have spent 50% less on diesel in April 2024, Eskom said in a statement.
The Generation Operational Recovery Plan, which has incorporated various independent reviews of generation operations, including those from the recently published VGBe report, and the investment in planned maintenance during the summer period, has contributed to the optimistic outlook, Eskom said. This includes:
- A 9% reduction in unplanned load losses from April 2023 to March 2024.
- A 19,2% reduction in unit trips between 2023 and 2024 financial years, indicating an increasingly more reliable generation fleet and availability of power supply.
- The restoration of three Kusile units that were offline since October 2022 and the synchronisation of Kusile Unit 5 collectively contributed an additional 3200 MW to the grid from September to December 2023.
- The successful completion of the Koeberg Unit 1 steam generator replacement as part of the Long-Term Operation project has restored 930MW of generation capacity.
- Progress on several projects aimed at minimising Partial Load Losses, including the cooling tower refurbishments at Kriel and Tutuka, and re-bagging at Majuba, with the completion of Tutuka units 1 2.
