As the country celebrated Women’s Day on Tuesday, power utility Eskom was celebrating a year of no load shedding. According to the power utility, this was due to its rigorous plant maintenance programme implemented in the past 12 months.
“The adherence to regularly scheduled maintenance is managed through the Tetris planning tool which schedules 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,” said Eskom spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe.
The fact that its been a year without load shedding does not mean that it’s been smooth sailing for many Soweto residents. About two months ago some parts of Soweto were left in the dark for a week which Eskom blamed on system overload.
Moving forward, the power utility aims to build on this success by achieving 80% plant availability, 10% planned maintenance and 10% unplanned maintenance over the medium term. Basically what this means is that Eskom is trying to make sure that the country does not run short of electricity power.
