Online Reporter
Energy and Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has lambasted Eskom for “dropping the ball” with recent incidences of maintenance and increased unplanned breakages.
According to the EskomSePush app, South Africa has seen 175 hours (seven days) of load shedding so far this year. It was mostly at very short notice after the sudden loss of several generating units and comes after a drastic reduction in load shedding in 2024 compared to 2023.
“I am very disappointed with Eskom’s performance in early 2025,” Ramokgopa said on the sidelines of the 60th anniversary of the commissioning of the SAFARI-1 research reactor at Pelindaba near Pretoria on Tuesday.
A week ago (19 March), he said Eskom had surplus energy during the morning peak, only to lose several generating units over the next five to six hours, which cost the utility 3 500MW of generation capacity and necessitated Stage 2 load shedding without prior notice.
“This erodes sentiment,” he said.
The public has started to believe that load shedding is something of the past, just to be subjected to it again.
On Monday (24 March) Eskom warned of a high risk of load shedding after losing six units. It was at least able to avoid it in the end.
Maintenance being compromised?
Ramokgopa said the problem is that the units that are breaking down are those that were taken offline for planned maintenance.
That leaves questions about the quality of maintenance. He said gains like adding the 800MW of the last Kusile unit to the grid are negated by the breakdowns on other units.
He hoped Eskom would have been significantly further on its road to generation recovery than it is now, but added “failure is acceptable”.
“The only kind of failure that is unacceptable is catastrophic failure.”
Ramokgopa warned that more load shedding means lower sales and higher costs to run emergency reserves like the diesel-gobbling open-cycle gas turbines and expressed doubt that Eskom will still show the R10 billion profit that was projected for the current financial year. – Moneyweb
