Maintenance will not result in load-shedding, says Eskom

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10-01-2014
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BusinessDay
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ESKOM will be operating on an extremely tight reserve margin of 1,000 megawatts (MW) — half of what is considered adequate to cover its risk profile — until April, while it conducts maintenance on its power plants, Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger said on Thursday.

However, he said, this was not unusual for this time of year and the company was not planning load-shedding. Mr Etzinger rejected as incorrect a report that two weeks of load-shedding each month for the next three months were on the cards.

"A reserve of 1,000MW does make us vulnerable, but we have been operating at that level for a number of years now, so that is not new. We would certainly let the public know if there was any load-shedding on the cards, which there is not.

"The reserve margin will be tight but we have no intention to load-shed, but of course we have to be prepared. Things can go wrong and for that reason we have contingency plans in place, if needed. At this stage the system is stable and we are working to ensure we avoid load-shedding."

About 5,500MW was out of service for maintenance and this would roughly persist until the end of March. During the winter months about 2,000MW would be taken out of the system.

In its regular status bulletin on the power system yesterday Eskom reported that the capacity available to meet the evening’s peak demand was 32,600MW — including open cycle gas turbines — while demand was forecast at 29,733MW.

Planned maintenance stood at 5,000MW and unplanned outages at 5,200MW.

Energy Intensive Users Group chairman Mike Rossouw said last year’s constraints had persisted.

In November Eskom had to declare an emergency when it exhausted its reserve of power supply and had to ask large industrial users to cut consumption.

"We are concerned that the threat remains. The big issue is that Eskom correctly made a decision to return to normal maintenance procedures which means that they have to take a plant out for maintenance," he said.

A lack of maintenance would cut the reliability of the fleet.

"The downside, and they have no choice but to do that, is that it means they have less capacity.

"The other big issue is that last year at this time there were a lot of initiatives that Eskom could undertake to take load off from a demand perspective. Those have all dried up now because of the funding constraints that they find themselves under."

Last year Eskom paid its energy intensive customers to reshift or cut electricity usage, for example by rescheduling operations to off-peak periods.

But Mr Rossouw said Eskom no longer had funds for this, because of the decision by the National Electricity Regulator of South Africa to only award the utility an increase of 8% over five years against the 16% it asked for.

"There can be no doubt that Eskom is doing everything they can to keep the situation going, but they can only go so far as their revenue will allow them."

Minister of Public Enterprises Malusi Gigaba’s spokesman Mayihlome Tshwete said the government was concerned about possible load-shedding "but this does not mean that we are panicking". Plans were in place to try to limit usage and to put more electricity onto the grid, he said.