Brian Molefe Brian Molefe
Johannesburg - Eskom plans to increase maintenance over winter but limit loadshedding, Acting Chief Executive Brian Molefe said on Wednesday.
“Keeping the lights on and doing maintenance appear to be contradictory but I think it is possible to have them both as objectives,” Molefe said at a press conference in Johannesburg.
“It is a mixture of the two. We have to find a point somewhere on the curve… There has to be a give and take between the two objectives. It is not as if we are confronted with a situation where if we keep the lights on we do zero maintenance…We have to find and fine tune the system to the point where we can do the maximum permissible maintenance while we are keeping the lights on maximally, as well and that is the juggling act we have to do at the moment. It is not one or the other.”
Molefe was briefing the media on the quarterly state of the system where he gave an update on the current state of the power system.
He said during this winter, there would be a three time increase in maintenance than in winter 2014.
“We are making every effort to prevent plant breakdown,” he said.
He said cold weather had increased the demand for electricity and maintenance had also put a strain on an already strained system, but added that there would be no blackout in South Africa during winter.
“We are happy to announce that the prospect of a blackout in South Africa is non existent… There is no prospect of a blackout in South Africa which represents a total system collapse,” Molefe said.
“Even when we have load shedding we are able to provide electricity to 96 percent of the country. At least 96 percent of the time electricity was available. What we are going to try and do now is maintenance with no load shedding.”
Molefe also announced the amendments to the three stages of loadshedding. He said Stage 1 would remain when there is a shortage of 1000 MW and Stage 2 would be implemented when there is a shortage of 2000 MW.
Stage 3 used to be when there was a shortage of 4000 MW, but it has now been declared to change to when there is a 3000 MW shortage, he said.
“This is just to reduce the gap between Stage 2 and Stage 3,” Molefe said.
Molefe said South Africa still had “ageing and volatile” plants and the cold weather would increase demand.
“Eskom has indeed performed very well in making sure that electricity was available under the very difficult circumstances we find ourselves in,” he said.
The power utility would continue to endeavour keeping the lights on but there was a risk of loadshedding in the morning and afternoon going forward, Molefe said.
“We will avoid as far as possible having to loadshed to avoid having an impact on business and the economy. Most of the time we hope that we will provide 100 percent electricity as to have no or minimal loadshedding,” he said.
The Quarterly State of the System Report showed that the power utility was making “steady progress” in reducing maintenance backlog, he said.
Since December, the availability of Eskom’s plant performance has improved from 65 percent to 75 percent. More than 64 percent of Eskom’s power stations were in their mid-life and required more preventative maintenance to improve performance and ensure their safety, Molefe said.
The power utility said that over the past few years a backlog of maintenance outages had developed. Eskom had identified it as a priority to reduce the backlog as well as keep up with the maintenance schedule.
Eskom said generation maintenance would continue to be done throughout the winter period to assist in ensuring a sustainable generation fleet, which was in line with the company’s vision of achieving an 80 percent plant availability, 10 percent planned maintenance and 10 percent unplanned maintenance in the next three years.
Molefe said that Eskom was undertaking a R280 billion capital expenditure programme over five years.
Medupi Unit 6 was successfully synchronised to the national power grid for the first time in March and was currently being progressively tested and optimised to enable it to join the Eskom Generation fleet as a contributor. Unit 6 currently fed 800MW into the national power grid.
Molefe added that the war room - under the leadership of Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa with the strategic responsibility for Eskom and consists of ministers and officials from several departments - had been extremely useful over the past six months and would continue to be be useful with the current winter plan.
Explaining the electricity tariff hike Eskom applied for, Molefe said the real increase was the 6.8 percent. The National Energy Regulator of SA would decide on the tariff increase by the end of June.
He said Eskom had applied for additional money for diesel to avoid loadshedding.
ANA
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