By Antoinette Slabbert.
Energy and Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has lambasted Eskom for “dropping the ball” with recent incidences of maintenance and increased unplanned breakages.
According to the EskomSePush app, South Africa has seen 175 hours (seven days) of load shedding so far this year. It was mostly at very short notice after the sudden loss of several generating units and comes after a drastic reduction in load shedding in 2024 compared to 2023.
“I am very disappointed with Eskom’s performance in early 2025,” Ramokgopa said on the sidelines of the 60th anniversary of the commissioning of the SAFARI-1 research reactor at Pelindaba near Pretoria on Tuesday.
A week ago (19 March), he said Eskom had surplus energy during the morning peak, only to lose several generating units over the next five to six hours, which cost the utility 3 500MW of generation capacity and necessitated Stage 2 load shedding without prior notice.
“This erodes sentiment,” he said. The public has started to believe that load shedding is something of the past, just to be subjected to it again.
On Monday (24 March) Eskom warned of a high risk of load shedding after losing six units. It was at least able to avoid it in the end.
Maintenance being compromised?
Ramokgopa said the problem is that the units that are breaking down are those that were taken offline for planned maintenance.
That leaves questions about the quality of maintenance.
He said gains like adding the 800MW of the last Kusile unit to the grid are negated by the breakdowns on other units.
He hoped Eskom would have been significantly further on its road to generation recovery than it is now, but added “failure is acceptable”.
“The only kind of failure that is unacceptable is catastrophic failure.”
Ramokgopa warned that more load shedding means lower sales and higher costs to run emergency reserves like the diesel-gobbling open-cycle gas turbines and expressed doubt that Eskom will still show the R10 billion profit that was projected for the current financial year.
He gave the assurance that budget cuts, the result of the lower-than-anticipated revenue energy regulator Nersa granted Eskom this year, won’t impact the utility’s generation recovery plan and money will be available for maintenance.
“I will have to sit with the board around that,” he said.
Eskom asked for an increase of 36% but was only granted 12.74%.
Eskom CFO Calib Cassim told Moneyweb there will be no impact on the maintenance budgets for the 2026 and 2027 financial years.
Generation target not being met
According to Eskom’s latest weekly system status report, the availability of its generation fleet was, on average, 58.72% in the week ended 23 March.
That is a bit higher than the average so far for 2025 of 56.96%, but falls well short of the target of 75% Eskom was expected to reach by the end of March.
On average, 28.44% of Eskom’s generation capacity has so far this year been unavailable due to unplanned breakdowns, which is higher than the average of 26.4% in 2024.
Financial consultancy Cresco last year forecast low levels of load shedding for this year and the next, followed by an increase in subsequent years.
In 2027, as coal decommissioning resumes, [the] energy deficit is expected to start increasing. From 2028 onward, the situation is expected to deteriorate significantly with national energy deficit steadily increasing,” Cresco said in a presentation.
In the meantime, Ramokgopa has called nuclear “the mainstay of energy generation” with a much brighter future than any other technology.
He said it would be a mistake to ignore the rapid development of small modular reactors and that the appointment of a panel of independent international experts to advise him on nuclear procurement is imminent.