Eskom marks one year of no load shedding
"In terms of our existing Generation Sustainability Strategy, our aim is to achieve 80 per cent plant availability, 10 per cent planned maintenance and 10 per cent unplanned maintenance over the medium term."
Yesterday Eskom marked exactly one year of no load shedding.
The adherence to regular scheduled maintenance is managed through the Tetris planning tool which schedule outages based on forecasted demand and maintenance requirements. A key aspect of this includes having a strict winter and summer maintenance budget that comprises 8.5GW for winter and 11.5GW for summer.
“In terms of our existing Generation Sustainability Strategy, our aim is to achieve 80 per cent plant availability, 10 per cent planned maintenance and 10 per cent unplanned maintenance over the medium term,”said Eskom.
The reduction in unplanned outages contributed to improvements of plant availability and the resultant sharp reduction in the usage of open cycle gas turbines (OCGTs). The last time Eskom ran OCGTs to manage the system was on 14 June 2016. The OCGT load factor year-to-date is 0.24 per cent versus against a target of 6 per cent. Our target is not to burn any diesel for the rest of the financial year.
Read: Eskom to keep lights on despite cold weather
The resilience of the power system was stress-tested in April this year following multiple trips of units at three power stations, a move that resulted in a loss of 3 535 MW. No load shedding was implemented due to the increased resilience that Eskom has built into the power system over the past few months.
