Electricity Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said there has been significant progress to reduce load shedding to 600 hours during the December and January 2023/24 period, when compared to December and January 2022/23.
The Minister said this has been possible by government’s interventions at Eskom and deploying qualified and experienced people to inconsistent power stations.
Ramokgopa revealed this when he was briefing the media in Pretoria about government’s implementation of the Energy Action Plan.
This was revealed by Minister of Electricity in the Presidency, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, who was updating the nation on Monday on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan.)
“If you were to take December 2022, to February 2023, and then you take the period of December 2023, to February 2024, is that the period of the year that was, we have experienced load shedding hours about 1 800 hours.
“But when you see a year later, we have had about 1 200 hours of load shedding. Essentially, we have been able to reduce the hours of load shedding to 600 hours. We’re going in the right direction,” said Ramokgopa.
In addition, 3510 megawatts of capacity were brought back has been clawed back into the system over the past year because of interventions at power stations.
The Minister said government’s aim is to get to a situation where the country doesn’t experience any hours of load shedding and reduce its intensity.
“Load shedding in its totality is unacceptable. But we’ve come to a situation that it has become a daily occurrence so gradually, we want to reduce that intensity of load shedding. We’re getting to a situation where we should not get accustomed to stage 6, we should not be accustomed to any form of load shedding,” explained Ramokgopa.
He added that given the improvement in the energy availability factor, “higher stages of load shedding, five and six, are totally unacceptable.”
The Minister said he would soon announce the expansion of transmission lined in the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, and Western Cape.
