‘Surviving winter’ – Experts to work at four power stations to manage load shedding

Minister in the Presidency responsible for electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, has announced technical experts will immediately be sent to four power stations to support the existing workforce from Monday.

Ramokgopa briefed the media on Friday on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan.

The experts, according to Ramokgopa, will be sent to the Matla, Kriel, Majuba and Kendal power stations, where the Energy Availability Factor (EAF) is low.

The experts have been funded by the Resource Mobilisation Fund (RMF), launched in March and raised R100 million through government’s partnership with the business sector.

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The experts include former Eskom employees and industry experts.

“We want to bring down unplanned capacity loss factor. Addressing ash dumps, cooling towers and the likes, they contribute to reducing the breakdowns to about 15 000MW at any given time. Our ambition is to go significantly lower than that.”

“This is not a vote of no confidence to the existing employees. We thought that we needed additional capacity in relation to ensuring that we implement this within the stipulated time frame,” said Ramokgopa.

Surviving winter

Ramokgopa said Eskom was looking for interventions to manage the grid as the winter period approaches and energy demand is expected to increase.

One of the interventions includes two additional hybrid projects from the risk mitigation independent power procurement programme, which have been approved by the Eskom board.

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“They will now proceed to legal close and are expected to reach a close by the end of June this year. They will add an additional 274MW to the grid,” said Ramokgopa.

On Monday, Ramokgopa met with Mozambican Minister for Mineral Resources and Energy, Carlos Zacarias, in a bid to acquire more megawatts.

“My counterpart in Mozambique and Eskom counterpart in Mozambique indicated that in the immediate, we will be offered about 80MW and in the next six months, we will get about 1000MW,” said Ramokgopa.

Ramokgopa on grid collapse

The electricity minister said Eskom was working to reduce load shedding to “significant or tolerable” levels.

“Load shedding by definition is not tolerable, but I’m sure we all appreciate that stage 1 is not stage 6. We want to eliminate all the stages, it is our mandate to do exactly that.”

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One of the challenges around load shedding, according to Ramokgopa, is the increase in demand when power comes back after load shedding.

“Don’t charge when it comes back, use what you can use and then at night, please charge back-up solutions.”

He also reassured South Africans that a grid collapse was “highly improbable”.

“The risk is extremely low given the kind of control measures we have at Eskom. Stage 5 or 6 doesn’t mean that we’re closer to a grid collapse. We don’t want load shedding, but it is an instrument at the disposal of the system controller to make sure that we are able to balance supply and demand.”

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