The power utility says there is a possibility that load shedding may be lifted but that this depended on the successful return to service of units.
ESKOM chief executive Andre de Ruyter has admitted that some of the power utility’s planned maintenance has not achieved its objectives, hence load shedding returned this week for the first time this year.
De Ruyter was speaking during Eskom’s virtual briefing on its current system challenges on Wednesday.
“A lot of the planned maintenance that was carried out did not meet all of our expectations in terms of the issues that were addressed due to inadequate front-end loading of those projects. These are major outages and typically take a number of months; they require spares, long-lead spares to be ordered for months in advance,” he said.
De Ruyter blamed this partly on inadequate project management as well as liquidity challenges that have constrained Eskom’s ability to place orders upfront for those long-lead items so that the entity has them available before commencing with an outage.
“It’s certainly disappointing that we were not able to make a bigger dent in this unreliable system of ours to ensure that we could carry out more planned maintenance successfully,” he said.
According to De Ruyter, Eskom’s unplanned load losses from its units out of production total 8,093 megawatts (MW) with partial load losses of 5,368MW.
“In total it’s 13,461MW of capacity that is unavailable due to unplanned outages. We obviously regret this and we are working hard to bring units back as quickly as possible,” he said.
De Ruyter added: “We are hoping to reduce the extent of load shedding as much as we can but unfortunately in this instance we had no alternative but to implement this decision.”
