By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Eskom chief operating officer (COO) Jan Oberholzer says that Eskom will do its best to keep the lights on for Christmas but warned that things could change very quickly.
“It is our intention not to have load shedding on Christmas Day; however, we are monitoring the situation,” he said.
The current outlook, barring any challenges over the next day or so, is that emergency reserves will have to be used to keep load shedding at bay. The intention is to keep load shedding suspended for at least ‘large parts’ of Christmas, he said.
Oberholzer said that Eskom would assess the situation on Saturday and make an announcement early on Sunday morning.
Aside from the Christmas update, Oberholzer said that there are no other changes to the current load shedding outlook.
Eskom said Stage 3 load shedding will be implemented from 05:00 on Saturday morning until 05:00 on Sunday morning. Currently, Stage 4 load shedding is being implemented.
He reiterated that with the current breakdowns, Koeberg 1 offline and Kusile and Medupi units still offline, South Africa faces a difficult year ahead.
“We see a challenging period ahead of us,” he said.
According to Eskom’s outlook for the next year, it needs to keep breakdowns below 13,000MW to stave off the worst of load shedding, but the utility has struggled to keep outages below 16,000MW – the worst-case scenario in its plans.
Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter announced his resignation this week on the back of the worst levels of load shedding on record. While Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan acknowledged that de Ruyter is not to blame for the load shedding, the power utility has not been able to resolve the crisis under his leadership.
Meanwhile Constitutional Court has ruled that Eskom was wrong to throttle the amount of bulk electricity it supplied to two heavily indebted municipalities.
In a close five-to-four ruling on Friday, the Constitutional Court agreed with ratepayers in the two municipalities that the power utility erred in reducing its bulk electricity supply.
Eskom, in 2020, started to decrease the amount of power it provided to the Ngwathe Municipality in the Free State and Lekwa Municipality in Mpumalanga after they each ran up debts of over R1 billion.
Unhappy ratepayers then took Eskom to court, arguing that they were unjustly being punished for the inability of their municipalities to pay Eskom. The ratepayers argued they had not been informed of the cuts, which often left them without power for over 10 hours a day.
In August of 2020, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria found for the ratepayers and ordered the utility to restore “uninterrupted power” to both Lekwa and Ngwathe.
The ruling was upheld on appeal. Eskom then took the matter on appeal to the Constitutional Court.
The apex court has now dismissed Eskom’s appeal, finding its decision to reduce bulk power infringed the rights of the residents of the municipalities, as set out in the Bill of Rights.
This means that Eskom cannot reduce the amount of bulk power it provides to the two municipalities to below what it previously supplied.
But the ruling was not unanimous.
The majority ruling penned by Justice Madlanga (with Mathopo, Mhlantla, Theron and Tshiqi concurring) found that Eskom’s decision to decrease power supply was unfair, as it had not informed residents before it took the decision.
The five justices ruled that residents of the municipalities were denied the opportunity to make representations to Eskom before the power was reduced.
But a minority judgment, written by acting Justice Unterhalter, (with Kollapen, Majiedt and Mlambo concurring) found that the ratepayers had failed to show that residents had a constitutional right to receive electricity from Eskom, rather than from their municipalities.
It found that the regulatory framework for electricity supply places the onus on municipalities, not Eskom, to supply electricity to residents.
The minority view also worried about what would happen if Eskom had to increase the amount of power it provided to all SA’s indebted municipalities.
However, the majority ruling noted that it was not saying that Eskom couldn’t reduce supply. Rather, it was underlining the fact that Eskom had to timeously inform residents before cuts were implemented, so they could object if they wanted to.
Eskom, in a short statement, said on Friday it would “abide by the Constitutional Court decision while exploring measures to safeguard its best interests in the matter”.