• As the weather warms demand for electricity is dipping.
• As such, Eskom will be pulling power stations offline for maintenance in order to foster a philosophy of maintaining equipment rather than waiting for a break.
• Unfortunately this means that loadshedding will persist albeit it at lower intensity the Minister of Electricity Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Sunday.

On Sunday Minister of Electricity Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa provided an update as regards the Energy Action Plan that was launched nearly a year ago.

The minister in the Presidency said that Eskom has now reached an energy availability factor of 60 percent and the utility was within sniffing distance of producing 30 000MW of electricity per day.

“So far for the past week – and I’m counting from Monday to Friday of last week – the generation average is about 28 932MW and you can see that on two occasions in the week – on the 8th and also the 10th, we reach the 29 000MW mark so for me I think it’s an illustration of the consistency on the generation side,” said Ramokgopa.

Demand is starting to come down but this, the minister says, can be attributed to warmer temperatures in the country.

While this is good news, South Africans shouldn’t expect loadshedding to be suspended.

The minister explained that Eskom made a decision not to take units out of service for maintenance during the Winter months. The logic here is that the utility needed every spare megawatt it could produce to meet the Winter demand. Even then, loadshedding persisted throughout the darker colder months although admittedly, loadshedding was never as bad as even Eskom’s worst predictions of Stage 8.

Now as demand is dipping, Eskom will embark on maintenance by taking power stations offline. The minister does however, point out that ultimately this maintenance will improve Eskom’s ability to generate power in the long term. Short term pain for long term gain to paraphrase the minister.

The minister says that the goal here is to conduct maintenance on a regular beat rather than waiting for something to go wrong. To that end, Ramokgopa highlighted a goal of bringing unplanned outages down to 14 000MW. At present unplanned outages average between 16 000 and 18 000MW.

“We’ll bring down the unplanned capacity loss factor the more we take out these units and fix them. We have some level of confidence the more we eliminate this unplanned capacity loss factor and the more we initiate other efforts to address the issues on the emission side so that we don’t exceed the emission license parameters, the more we’re able to run these units,” Ramokgopa said.

The minister went on to say that Eskom is nearing the 32 000MW generating capacity mark. This would mean that Eskom can meet demand, provided that demand doesn’t hit the 33 000MW it has for most of Winter.

The good news is that there is movement and tangible results from the efforts being made by government to address an energy crisis of its own making.

Loadshedding isn’t going away though and with the warmer months approaching along with an El Niño, we wonder if demand will really continue on this downward trend or if cooling appliances will simply replace our heating appliances.

You can watch the full Energy Action Plan update in the hour long video below.

[Image – CC BY ND 2.0 GovernmentZA]