By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Dan Marokane assumed his role as Eskom Group Chief Executive after an almost year-long search for a candidate to take the toughest job in South Africa.
Marokane officially began his five-year tenure at Eskom on Friday.
Eskom Board Chairman Mteto Nyati expressed confidence in Marokane’s abilities, as well as in the leadership and staff of Eskom, emphasising their collective commitment to turning the organisation around.
“We expect Dan and his leadership team to accomplish at least two critical tasks. First, they must address the current business challenges. Loadshedding must become a thing of the past.
“Second, they need to reposition and restructure Eskom to enable growth and sustainability, “said Nyati.
These first 100 days are crucial for helping him gain necessary insights about Eskom and the industry, added Nyati.
He said that Morakane will not be engaging the media in these 100 days, noting that he will only be “in a position to engage” after the critical period.
This as the country continues to experience crippling power cuts daily.
National energy regulator NERSA approved the issuing of a licence to the National Transmission Company of South Africa to operate a transmission system in June last year.
Eskom’s unbundling process will see the power utility restructured into three separate units: generation, transmission, and distribution of electricity.
Meanwhile Eskom says that it will ease load shedding this weekend, suspending outages during the day.
Due to the anticipated return to service of additional generating units over the weekend, Stage 2 load shedding will continue to be implemented until 05h00 on Saturday.
Thereafter, load shedding will be suspended until 16h00. Stage 2 load shedding will resume from 16h00 until 05h00 on Sunday.
This alternating pattern of suspending load shedding from 05h00 until 16h00 and implementing Stage 2 load shedding from 16h00 until 05h00 will be repeated on Sunday.
Unplanned outages have further reduced to 13,921MW of generating capacity, while the capacity out of service for planned maintenance is at 6,831MW.
For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.
Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.