Eskom’s power station generating capacity recovery has been significant enough that South Africans might only experience two weeks of load-shedding in 2024, according to the Sunday newspaper Rapport.
Amid South Africa’s longest load-shedding break in nearly three years, EE Business Intelligence managing director Chris Yelland said Eskom’s plan to fix its ageing power station fleet appeared to be working.
Yelland attributed part of this improvement to National Treasury providing more money to Eskom and being more cooperative when it came to letting the utility procure parts and expertise from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
OEMs’ direct involvement in maintaining power stations is one of the elements of the Generation Recovery Plan, developed by Eskom’s board following a detailed report on the state of the power utility’s stations by German consultancy firm VGB Energy.
Combined with an intensive planned maintenance regime, Eskom has been able to reduce the amount of capacity lost to unplanned unit outages.
The unplanned capacity loss factor (UCLF) of Eskom’s fleet has reduced from around 30% to 35% in 2023 to 25% in recent months.
Although that still means a quarter of Eskom’s total capacity is consistently unavailable due to breakdowns, a 5% improvement is equal to around 2,500MW of additional power.
If this is applied to Eskom’s 52-week system status outlook, load-shedding might only need to be implemented in the weeks of 23 September and 28 October 2024.
However, this situation remains fluid, with Yelland warning that only time will tell if Eskom can sustain the improvements.
As an illustration of the volatility of Eskom’s fleet, its system status outlook for week 21 of 2024 showed that the UCLF had increased by more than three percentage points to 29%.
As a result, the energy availability factor (EAF) also dropped from 64.84% to 61.35%.
Fortunately, this has improved again in week 22, where UCLF dropped to 26.13% and EAF improved to 64.30%.
Eskom makes little mention of demand reduction
As of Sunday, 9 June 2024, Eskom’s load-shedding suspension had lasted around 74 days, the longest break in the rotational power cuts since mid-2021.
Eskom attributed the improvement to the Generation Operational Recovery Plan’s increased planned maintenance during the summer months of 2023/24.
Eskom said around 8,000MW — or 18% — of its capacity was under maintenance during December 2023 and January 2024.
The power utility also highlighted key fleet performance metrics:
- Between 1 April 2024 and 6 June 2024, the unplanned capacity loss factor (UCLF) was 28.0%, a reduction from 35.7% recorded in the same period last year.
- Over the same period, the energy availability factor (EAF) stood at 61.1%, up from 53.2% over the same period last year.
- Open-cycle gas turbine (OCGT) expenditure during the period stood at R1.71 billion compared with R7.4 billion over the same period last year, a 77% reduction.
- OCGT production during the period has also declined from 246.91GWh 1,210.23GWh.
Eskom has repeatedly neglected to mention that a drastic decrease in demand has also helped it keep the lights on. This has been driven by lower economic activity and a surge in private rooftop solar uptake.
Rooftop solar has played a critical role in enabling the utility to rely less on its emergency generation reserves during the day and have that capacity available for dispatching during peak demand periods.
Eskom has only acknowledged this impact once — during its State of the System media briefing on 26 April 2024 — which also provided a load-shedding outlook for the winter.
In its more recent update, Eskom said the forecast of load-shedding being limited to stage 2 remained in force, despite generation performing better than expected.
“The current unplanned outages average is at 11,300MW, which is 3,000MW less than what was anticipated,” Eskom said.
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