By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Eskom has warned that it may be forced to re-introduce load shedding at short notice after five of its generating units tripped on Monday morning.
The group said that load shedding may have to be introduced if it loses any more generating capacity.
The units, which tripped in the early hours of Monday morning, took 2,000MW of capacity off the network.
“While some generation units at other power stations are expected to return to service during the day, these will take time to load to full capacity,” it said.
“Should there be any further loss of generation capacity during the day, or some units fail to return to service as anticipated, load shedding may be required to be implemented at short notice.”
Eskom currently has 1,018 MW off in planned maintenance, with another 17,022MW off due to breakdowns. It said it is working to restore units to service as soon as possible.
South Africans have suffered through more than five weeks of continuous load shedding, with stages hitting as high as stage 6. The outages were primarily driven by illegal strikes at its power stations as workers demanded higher wages.
After the strikes ended, the power utility used daily load shedding at various stages to rebuild capacity. Load shedding was suspended earlier than anticipated on Saturday (23 July).
The country is waiting on president Cyril Ramaphosa to announce a promised ‘package’ of interventions to help alleviate the country’s power crisis.
Ramaphosa said that the government is close to announcing a plan to deal with the nation’s energy crisis. The country has had record power outages this year, leading to calls from business, labor and opposition parties for Ramaphosa and his government to take urgent action.
The plan is being finalized and will be announced “soon”‘ the president said.
Meanwhile the opposition party, DA has requested that Ramaphosa should declare a ring-fenced state of disaster in the electricity sector, allow well-run municipalities to procure, generate and store their own electricity, and incentivise small-scale embedded electricity generators.
DA leader John Steenhuisen said the only priority now is restoring our supply. Waive all preferential procurement requirements. Only the quickest and cheapest solutions will do, and we cannot afford the extra layer of cost that BEE adds.
He presented the DA’s proposals on Monday following their meeting with Ramaphosa.
“The most important piece of advice we can give the president is that he should get his government out of the way of those who want to – and who are able to – fix this mess. Many of the obstacles to increased generation are self-imposed by the government.