Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said it is unacceptable that Eskom has lost 17 300 megawatts due to outages, that resulted in the return of load shedding since last week.
He said this is reversing most of the positive gains made by the utility in the past, to keep the loss at 14 500 megawatts as a benchmark.
Ramokgopa was briefing the media in Pretoria about the government’s Energy Action Plan.
“We have received about 17 500 megawatts of electricity loss, and that is significant on many accounts.
It undermines the positive trajectory that we’ve been having since last month that there’s improvement on the grid, and as a result of that for an average person can see in the intensity of load shedding, that is why for a period we were not able to have load shedding.
But as a result of these failures, and it is something that is receiving attention, we’ve gone back to about 17 000 megawatts and is totally unacceptable,” said Ramokgopa.
Ramokgopa highlighted that this took place on the week of 27 October to 3 November.
This has been mainly caused by outage slips and boiler tube leaks in 11 generating units, which took a long time to repair and return to service.
The Minister, however, said he is grateful that some of the affected units will return to service this week.
“I’m advised that six of the 11 units are still off, we’re expecting them to come back by Wednesday and Thursday of this week.
Five units have already come back and that is why we are seeing a little bit of ease because that coincided with the weekend and the issues of lower demand,” explained Ramokgopa.
The Minister also announced that the first consignment of generators from China has arrived in the country.
The generators, which will be unveiled on 16 November, are expected to help alleviate pressure from the grid.
“I did say that we’re going to get 450 units of alternative emergency power solutions.
This is a various configuration of diesel generators, the first of these is the smallest of the generators, and we’ll deploy them at various clinics.
The major beneficiaries in government of that work, is going to be the department of Health, because we’re targeting clinics that are in remote areas so that we’re able to ensure that refrigeration remains intact, even in instances of load shedding there’s a preservation of medication and we’re able to maintain required temperature,” said the Minister.
The delivery follows a memorandum of cooperation that Ramokgopa signed with eight Chinese entities in August, as part of the government’s “continued effort to strengthen partnerships to advance energy security and our energy transition.”
Meanwhile, Ramokgopa said the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2023, is at a final stage and will be presented to cabinet before the end of November.
The Minister said the plan will determine the type and scale of investments that will be “made in the economy, to ensure that we’re able to meet that energy mix, end load shedding and in a long term ensure that there’s energy security.”
