There’s no guarantee of load shedding-free future despite current respite, says Ramokgopa

Electricity Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has acknowledged that Eskom had successfully maintained minimal load shedding during the festive season. However, he cannot assure South Africans that this situation will persist indefinitely.

South Africans experienced a largely load shedding-free December due to improved generating capacity and emergency reserves. On Sunday, Eskom extended the suspension of load shedding until further notice.

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This as a result of the sustained improved generating capacity and sufficient emergency reserves, it said.

While Eskom managed to prevent load shedding for a period, Ramokgopa on Tuesday highlighted the unreliability of some generating units.

“We do accept that the majority of these units still remain unreliable, we are addressing the planned maintenance. The key measure there is that when the units come back from planned maintenance, we should not have repeat failures. This is what the generation team managed to do,” said Ramokgopa.

“The units went out and we were forced to implement load shedding again. We’re getting through that recovery and we’re experiencing a period of no load shedding again. We will have this period of days of no load shedding and then there will be days of load shedding.

“The system still remains unreliable, we’re working on these units. I can’t stand here and tell the country that there will be no load shedding going into the future , that’s why when the alert goes out, it says until further notice. We have no control over some of these units, they are extremely unreliable.”

Between 22 and 29 December, when electricity demand was low, Eskom carried out planned maintenance on units to ensure their optimal functioning when demand increases.

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We implemented the planned maintenance “so that when these units come back, they come back healthier in preparation for when the demand ramps up again”.

What Eskom is doing to end load shedding

Ramokgopa hailed the signing of the memorandum of understanding between him and Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan as a significant step towards implementing of the energy action plan.

On Friday, President Cyril Ramaphosa approved the memorandum of understanding to clarify the two ministers’ respective responsibilities with reference to Eskom and the resolution of the electricity crisis.

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Among Ramokgopa’s responsibilities are to focus full-time on all aspects of the electricity crisis and the work of the National Energy Crisis Committee and exercise authority over the Eskom board and management on ending load shedding and ensure that the Energy Action Plan is implemented.

“It is important that the ministers do have some degree of powers to be able to execute these responsibilities. And key to this has to do with the extent to which the minister is able to engage with the Eskom board and to what degree the minister is able to execute some of the priorities from a new generation point of view from the optimisation of the existing fleet,” Ramokgopa said.

The minister said the Eskom team will also ensure to not repeat the same mistake with Unit 1 at Kusile.

“Unit 1 at Kusile, remember there were significant delays in relation to the timeline (June 2023), but it was returned five months later. We’re confident from the work that the generating team has done that we’ll not have a repeat when we want to return Unit 2,” he said.

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Unit 1 at Koeberg is now on full load, he said.

“It passed the full load rejection test on 30 December and is now unleashing the megawatts required of it and we hope that it will continue to do so for the next 20 years,” he said.

Unit 5 at Kusile is also now synchronised.

“But the power is intermittent as they are doing a number of tests before it goes on full commercial operation. It is running at 60%. It usually takes about six months.”