No change to load shedding plans, according to the power utility’s bosses
POWER utility Eskom on Thursday announced that more of its units that have forced the country into its first bout of load shedding this year had failed to recover.
Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter and other executives provided another system update following the plunging of the nation into Stage 2 blackouts until Monday morning.
”Overnight we gained some units, regrettably we also lost some units. Matla 5 returned to service so that’s pleasing, for planned outages we took out Kendal unit 3 as well as Medupi unit 6. We had two trips … Tutuka 4 tripped as well as Arnot 2 had a shutdown,” De Ruyter said.
He said the non-commercial unit, Kusile 4, returned to service.
”Kusile is currently running at 333 megawatts, which is still not good performance from that plant considering that three commercial plants are not productive,” De Ruyter explained.
According to De Ruyter, Kendal unit 5 also returned to service.
”There are plans in place to return more units to service, our recovery is as anticipated, however, we have to point out that there is still possibility that we may lose further units and therefore at this point in time our guidance remains that we will maintain Stage 2 load shedding until 5 o’clock on Monday morning.
That is the outlook where we are right now,” he added.
De Ruyter also revealed that Eskom was currently sitting at capacity outage of 5 155MW.
”We have partial unplanned load losses of 5 183MW and full load losses of 7 719MW for a total of unplanned load losses of 12 902MW, which is a slight improvement from where we were yesterday (Wednesday),” he said.
The power utility’s dam levels have recovered somewhat, De Ruyter said, and these were adequate for a Thursday morning.
”The way in which we manage our dams is that over weekends when demand is lower we replenish our dams. We will manage our dam levels over the weekend and replenish upper dams so that will give us, for Monday morning, reserve capacity that we require from a pump storage perspective,” he further said.
De Ruyter said Eskom has managed to improve the stock holding of its diesel at the open cycle gas turbine plants.
At Ankerlig Power Station in Cape Town as well as Gourikwa Power Station in Mossel Bay, stock was currently sitting at 59% and 84%, respectively, after it had fell to 30% at Ankerlig on Wednesday.
Political Bureau
