Ramokgopa explains why stage 6 load shedding is back and likely to get worse

Minister of Electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said the country was plunged into stage 6 load shedding because Eskom was not “sticking to its planned maintenance schedule” and that South Africans can expect intensified power cuts to persist in the short term.

Ramokgopa was briefing the media about the performance of the grid on Tuesday morning.

Eskom ramped up the deliberate power cuts to stage 6 on Monday citing planned maintenance and the loss of two generation units.

Not sticking to maintenance

Ramokgopa said there must be no compromises on the planned and philosophy maintenance of electricity generation units.

“Us as a team we have taken a view that part of the reason we are where we are as a country in relation to the deterioration of the generating capacity was that we have not been sticking to planned maintenance, we have not been sticking to philosophy maintenance.

“And that had to do with the fact that Eskom’s balance sheet was severely compromised. There was little resources to invest on the maintenance side. And what had been happening over a period of time is that the units have been exploited without the necessary maintenance, planned maintenance, philosophy maintenance and this caught up with us and that’s why we are in this situation,” said Ramokgopa.

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Intensified load shedding

Ramokgopa said part of the fiscal relief of the R254 billion provided by National Treasury to Eskom was to ensure that the parastatal invests “heavily” on maintenance.

The minister said they will be now “sticking” to the maintenance schedule, but this will increase the intensity of load shedding.

“We are going to stick to planned and philosophy maintenance. We do accept that in the short-term its going to result in the possibility of intensified load shedding. That’s because ramped up planned and philosophy maintenance is accompanied by an unplanned capacity loss factor” said Ramokgopa.

Summer forecast

The minister also added that the country exited the winter period with “little harm.”

“Of course, we reached stage 6 at some period, but not as severe as we had anticipated.

“If the unplanned capacity loss factor was to reach 18 000MW+ and that peak demand was going to be about 33 000MW, we were going to reach higher stages of load shedding even stage 8 and beyond,” he said.

Ramakgopa said now that the country has entered the winter period, the electricity demand has gone down.

“So, we are ramping up on our planned maintenance to ensure that we are able to build a degree of resilience in the system to make sure that the units are reliable and give us as many hours of generating capacity as possible,” he said.

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