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Eskom will continue to implement stage 4 load shedding during evening peak hours until Friday, according to its outgoing CEO André de Ruyter.
De Ruyter revealed this on Tuesday during a meeting with Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa), which was briefed by Eskom’s board and executives.
He said stage 4 rolling blackouts would continue to be implemented from 4pm until 5am for the rest of the week in order for Eskom to preserve its emergency generation reserves.
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Stage 3 load shedding will continue to kick in daily from 5am until 4pm.
“Unfortunately, load shedding stage 4 will be maintained for evening peaks until Friday because we need to conserve diesel as well as our open cycle gas turbines and for persevering our pump storage reserves,” said De Ruyter.
De Ruyter said Eskom’s emergency generation reserves were important to cater for any unforeseen breakdowns or unplanned outages at its power stations.
“Those unplanned outages could occur at any moment due to the lack of reliability of the fleet. And, therefore, we have to have that buffer capacity that can be ramped up and deployed very quickly in order to prevent a total system blackout, which is, of course, what we want to avoid at all costs.”
Eskom’s chief financial officer (CFO) Calib Cassim said the parastatal had spent R18 billion on diesel from its budget of R8 billion for the current financial year – which is R10 billion above its budget.
He said Eskom will need roughly R16 billion this year to procure diesel for its open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs) in order to keep the lights on during peak hours.
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If the power utility had more money available to run its OCGTs, De Ruyter said stage 6 load shedding – which was implemented indefinitely earlier this month – would have been avoided.
“Because of a lack of liquidity and Eskom’s constrained finances, we were unable to run our open cycle gas turbines to their maximum capacity.
“Bear in mind that these plants were never designed to operate as baseload generators and it would be ill-advised to consider them as such. But if we had more money available for diesel, the stages of load shedding would have been reduced,” he said.
At the weekend, Eskom’s chief operating officer (COO) Jan Oberholzer revealed that the power utility was able to procure more than 50 million litres of diesel earlier this month.
“This will be as and when required to make sure that we manage the pump dam levels and to make sure we manage the levels of load shedding,” Oberholzer said.
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