By Mmangaliso Khumalo.
State owned power utility Eskom says it does not foresee any reason to implement loadshedding within the next week, due to ongoing sustained improvements.
Eskom spokesperson, Daphne Mokwena, said on Friday the continuation of suspended loadshedding is due to ongoing sustained improvements in generation performance.
“The Eskom Generation Operational Recovery Plan, initiated in March 2023, along with extensive planned maintenance, continues to deliver the improved reliability and availability of the generation fleet.
“The Unplanned Capacity Loss Factor (UCLF) decreased to 28.37% in the financial year to date (1 April 2024 to 30 May 2024), a reduction from 35.5% recorded in the same period last year (1 April 2023 to 30 May 2023).
“This reduction in UCLF, represents a 7.5% improvement in the current financial year (1 April 2024 to 30 May 2024) as compared to the previous year in the same period.”
There have now been 65 consecutive days without loadshedding, the longest period in South Africa without loadshedding since 2 February 2022.
Mokwena adds that the energy availability factor has increased.
“The year-to-date (1 April 2024 to 30 May 2024) EAF increased to 61.0%. This is a significant 8.3% improvement compared to the same period last year (1 April 2023 to 30 May 2023), where the EAF was 52.7%.
“The weekly EAF has moved from 57.0% to 65.0% from 1 April to 30 May 2024. The EAF improvement is primarily due to a drop in the unplanned outages of the generation units which averaged at 12 500MW in the month of May 2024.”
She adds that the winter forecast anticipates a likely scenario of unplanned outages at 15,500MW and loadshedding limited to Stage 2.
“The current unplanned outages average at 12 500MW which is 3 000MW less than what was anticipated. A total of 3 500MW of generating capacity is planned to be returned to service by Monday.”
If there are no changes, Eskom says its next update about the state of the grid will be on 7 June.