Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has defended the intensified philosophy maintenance programme at Eskom in spite of the power utility implementing heightened load shedding.
Eskom yesterday ramped up load shedding to Stage 6 due to the loss of a further two generation units amid an increase in generation planned maintenance.
Ramokgopa said the reason for the deterioration of the generating capacity was that Eskom had not been sticking to its philosophy maintenance for many years, which had led to generation units frequently breaking down.
The minister said this had to do with the fact that Eskom’s balance sheet was severely compromised and there were very little resources to invest on maintenance.
He said part of the National Treasury’s recent R254 billion fiscal relief was to ensure that Eskom invested heavily on maintenance of its ageing coal fleet.
As a result, Ramokgopa said Eskom would henceforth be sticking to the maintenance schedule of its plants, but this would increase the likelihood of intensified load shedding.
“And what has been happening over a period of time is that the units have been exploited without the necessary maintenance, planned maintenance, philosophy maintenance and this caught up with us and that’s why we are in this situation,” Ramokgopa said.
“We are going to stick to planned and philosophy maintenance. We do accept that in the short-term it's going to result in the possibility of intensified load shedding. That’s because ramped up planned and philosophy maintenance is accompanied by an unplanned capacity loss factor.
“So, we are ramping up on our planned maintenance to ensure that we are able to build a degree of resilience in the system to make sure that the units are reliable and give us as many hours of generating capacity as possible.”
At the height of eased power cuts in July, Ramokgopa had said the decline in load shedding was “not an act of God”, but a testament to Eskom’s recovery.
Eskom said yesterday that Stage 6 load shedding was implemented as breakdowns rose to 16 210MW of generating capacity, while 5 894MW capacity was out of service for planned maintenance.
The utility’s load forecast for the evening peak demand was 28 603MW as demand for electricity normally increased during evening peak hours.
Ramakgopa said if breakdowns were to reach 18 000MW and peak demand rose to about 33 000MW, there would be higher stages of load shedding, even stage 8 and beyond.
Eskom head of generation Bheki Nxumalo was, however, hopeful that the utility would be able to arrest the declining generation capacity by the end of the week.
Nxumalo said pumped storage reserves would likely have recovered by the end of the week, enabling lower stages of load shedding as higher stages of load shedding had been sparked by low reserves.
He said Eskom was not aggressively ramping up its maintenance plans as only units that were on long outages were part of the philosophy maintenance programme.
“The spike that we've seen over this weekend was those partial load losses that came through a unit that had a safety risk that we couldn't keep on the load and we had to plan for them in the short term,” Nxumalo said.
“When we were starting to recover, we had additional units break down late Sunday evening and yesterday. Towards the end of this week, we should be in a position to start reducing the stages from the current stage 6.”
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