By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Less than a week after Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said he was confident that Eskom had enough generating capacity to withstand the cold weather, the power utility announced the implementation of Stage 6 load shedding.
Eskom said that the loss of additional generating units overnight, the extensive use of Open Gas Cycle Turbines and the inability to replenish pumped storage dam levels are the cause.
Stage 4 loadshedding will be implemented from 07h00 on Wednesday until 14h00. Thereafter, stage 6 loadshedding will be implemented from 14h00 until 05h00 on Thursday.
This pattern will be repeated daily until further notice. Eskom will publish an update as soon as any significant changes occur.
The sudden move back to high stages of load shedding follows about 4 weeks of breathing space where load shedding was suspended for most of the day. This reprieve affected all sorts of tracking data, even indicating a turning point for rolling outages.
However, energy experts and analysts have been consistent in their warnings that the break was not a permanent thing, noting that the grid was benefitting from external energy boosts – such as increased wind energy generation and lower demand from end-users – rather than significant improvements at Eskom itself.
While the minister of electricity recently lauded Eskom’s improvements in energy availability to 60%, analysts were quick to point out that the utility was still under that level, at around 58-59% EAF.
Any shift in the beneficial factors would have led to higher stages of load shedding – and in this case, a cold snap has pushed up demand significantly.
Until now, user demand had settled somewhere around 29,000-30,000MW – much lower than the 34,000-36,000MW demand forecast by Eskom at the start of winter.
However, due to the much colder weather, this demand has now climbed to above 33,000MW, adding the equivalent of four stages of load shedding very suddenly.
Because Eskom can only reliably supply around 28,000MW, this spike in demand pushed the shortfall from 1,000-2,000MW to almost 6,000MW, hence the higher stages of load shedding now in effect.
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.