By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom has announced that load shedding will be increased to Stage 2 early on Tuesday morning after three generation units failed.
Stage 2 load shedding will be in effect from 05h00 to 16h00, it said, with a further update to follow in the afternoon.
The group had previously intended to keep the load shedding schedule on a rotation between stage 1 during the day and stage 3 in the evening.
The sudden loss of three units marks the first time in recent weeks that the utility has been forced to abruptly alter the load shedding schedule.
At a media engagement last week (24 August), acting CEO Calib Cassim said that the utility has been aiming to keep the load shedding schedules as stable as possible so businesses and South Africans can better prepare and plan their lives around the outages.
The utility has slowly been improving overall performance and has even managed to suspend outages for a time during periods of low demand.
However, the sudden changes serve as a reminder that the grid remains extremely volatile and the company continues to operate on a knife’s edge.
When asked how long South Africa will continue living in this situation – waiting each day to hear whether load shedding will be up or down, off or on – Cassim said that the situation should improve in 2024.
More generating capacity is expected to return in the last few months of 2023, with the return of three units at Kusile and several other interventions on the demand-side yielding results. However, it’s in 2024 that many new projects will be coming online.
Until then, South Africa will have to continue dealing with load shedding and the ever-present possibility that things can change at any time.
Meanwhile Eskom suffered a R5 billion loss before tax in the first quarter of the 2023/24 financial year ending June 2023.
The group’s unaudited quarterly results were presented to the Standing Committee on Appropriations on Tuesday (29 August) by the National Treasury, alongside the financial updates for other state-owned companies.
The group’s net revenue grew to R70.9 billion (versus R66.3 billion over the same quarter in 2022), which was largely driven by the significant 18.65% increase to tariffs for direct customers from 1 April 2023.
Sales volumes were 6.2% lower than budgeted and declined by 7% compared to the previous comparable period.
Sales volumes were impacted by generation supply constraints, it said, which lead to the load curtailment and load shedding that have been a daily feature in the lives of South Africans for almost a full year.
More positively, however, the group said that its primary energy costs were R3.5 billion lower than budgeted at R43.4 billion. This was mainly due to expenditure on Open Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGTs) being 19.3% lower than budgeted.
The lower spend was mainly driven by a favourable decline in diesel prices during the quarter, it said.
The group’s other finances reflect the strained position the group has been in for over a decade.
Gross debt securities and borrowings increased to a massive R454.5 billion as at 30 June (up from R439 billion in March). The group raised R16 billion in funding through private placements with the related disbursements only taking place in early April.