By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Bureau for Economic Research (BER) says that the reprieve in daytime load shedding is due to Eskom’s energy availability factor (EAF) improving – up from 55.06% to 58.22% in the last week.
Eskom’s EAF for the first 19 weeks of the year declined.
Simply put, the energy availability factor decline means it has less generation power to serve South Africa’s electricity needs.
However, load shedding so far in June has been at lower stages. For all of last week, load shedding was suspended between midnight and 16h00 each day – a pattern which will continue this week (until further notice).
Broadly, the change in load shedding can be attributed to the following:
- A reduction in planned maintenance, cutting up to 4 stages of load shedding
- A reduction in unplanned outages to around Eskom’s planned levels of 15,000MW
- Increased wind energy generation due to stormy weather
- Lower-than-expected demand (32,000MW vs 35,000-37,000MW)
- Higher electricity tariffs in winter, curbing industry use
- Changes to Eskom’s management structure
- A boost in morale at Eskom
The Bureau for Economic Research (BER) said this is partly due to a seasonal cutback in planned maintenance, with more generating units online.
For instance, Eskom, on 11 June, said that generating units out for planned maintenance stood at 3,766MW.
Despite a jump from the 2,497 MW out for planned maintenance just two days prior, it is still significantly less than the 7,147MW out for maintenance in late March. In other words, Eskom is saving about 4,000MW – equivalent to four stages of load shedding – by cutting back its planned maintenance.
The BER added that a reduction in unplanned outages and a substantial boost in wind energy generation also helped to increase generation.
Eskom Generation Executive Eric Shunmagum said that a series of winter storms over the last week helped offshore wind plants to boost their output.
In addition, the BER said that demand for power is significantly lower than Eskom expected.
The BER added that the reduction in demand was due to the higher winter electricity tariffs kicking in, resulting in power-intensive smelters scaling back operations.
The chairman of beleaguered state power utility, Mpho Makwana said a change in its management structure has helped improve its plant performance, enabling blackouts to be eased, and further gains can be expected.
Over the past few weeks, the proportion of power Eskom could produce relative to its generating capacity has risen to 60.5%, compared with about 56% a year ago, Makwana said in an interview in Bloomberg’s Johannesburg bureau on Friday.
The improvement belied warnings that South Africa’s winter weather could see blackouts exceed previous records of as long as 12 hours a day earlier this year. The power cuts, which began in 2008, have hobbled South Africa’s economy and weakened the rand. The central bank estimates that the outages will shave 2 percentage points off the nation’s growth rate this year.
Despite the evident improvement in energy availability and reduced load shedding, Eskom’s grid remains highly vulnerable to shocks, and the situation can change at any moment.
Should the group suffer more breakdowns or incredibly cold weather hits the country – pushing up demand – the old pattern of higher stages of load shedding could return. The country is operating on a very fine balance between supply and demand, and the smallest nudge on either side can cause the system to break.
The government’s and Eskom’s plans to address this imbalance and get rid of load shedding altogether are long-term, and only likely to give South Africa a solid foundation to beat the outages over the next 12 to 24 months.
The grid itself should be more stable near the end of 2023 and in early 2024 as units at Kusile and Medupi that have been offline for long periods come back into operation. In addition to this, approved independent energy projects should start coming online at the end of 2024.