Eskom hopeful there will be no load shedding next week

Eskom said on Thursday that it remains on track to end load shedding by the weekend, and is hopeful that there won’t be any rolling power cuts next week, though Monday could prove “tight”.

South Africa moved from stage-4 to stage-3 load shedding at 10pm on Wednesday evening after the state-owned electricity utility brought some generating units back online.

CEO André de Ruyter said the outlook is now more positive, but warned that the system remains unreliable.

“There are risks in the system that are difficult to forecast. Depending on how we perform over the weekend, and with additional rainfall forecast for the weekend, we may see further impacts on the availability of generation capacity,” De Ruyter said.

“The prognosis is we don’t anticipate load shedding for next week, but that is dependent on the stability of our generating units,” he said.

“Monday is likely to be tight. After that, if we can bring those units back [online] that are currently planned to return to service, and if we can get an additional reduction in partial load losses, we should be okay. We don’t plan for load shedding for next week, but there is always a residual risk.”

De Ruyter said separately that Eskom has spent more than R720-million on diesel for its open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs) so far this month in an effort to reduce the impact of load shedding. The utility has burned through 48.5 million litres of diesel in the first three weeks of April.

In the financial year ended 31 March 2022, Eskom spent R7-billion on diesel for its own OCGT plants, and a further R3.5-billion on diesel used by independently owned OCGTs.  — © 2022 NewsCentral Media