Eskom says South Africans must brace themselves for a hard year of power outages.
The state-owned power utility's executives addressed a media briefing on Wednesday to give an update on challenges faced by its system since it ramped up load-shedding to stage 4.
LISTEN | Load-shedding could go up to stage 6 this week, says Eskom
Head of generation Philip Dukashe said the company is working to reduce the impact of load-shedding.
He said Eskom is doing all it can to ensure power units are maintained but the maintenance of some units needed to be enhanced due to their age.
“Sometimes we bring back units from outages, they run and then they fail and we realise there are other areas we should have attended to during those maintenance periods,” he said.
Here are five talking points from the briefing. Let us know what you think.
Municipalities weren't playing ball, but now many are on board
COO Jan Oberholzer said municipalities are implementing the load-shedding timetable in their communities. Eskom previously accused some municipalities of refusing to implement load-shedding in accordance with the timetable issued by Eskom.
“Yesterday [Tuesday] we did a reconciliation and we were satisfied that our request had been implemented. We are satisfied with the municipalities' assistance,” he said.
Eskom is trying to avoid stage 6 load-shedding
Though there are concerns about diesel reserves, Eskom will ensure that load-shedding does not reach stage 6. Russia's invasion of Ukraine could potentially affect the diesel supply in SA.
“We will do whatever we can to make sure we limit that. That is why this morning we decided to implement stage 4 to make sure we're not close to stage 6.”
Rainy weather affects power generation
Dukashe said rainy weather conditions affect Eskom's ability to generate power.
“It increases the risk. If it's raining in the areas where there are coal power stations, if the coal needs to be transported. In most of our stations we have plans that are robust and have, over the past year, proven successful,” he said.
Eskom needs additional capacity
Oberholzer said the power utility is in need of additional capacity.
“We have a system that has been neglected and has not had proper maintenance. We are dealing with it the best way we can.”
SA can't cut power supplies to neighbouring countries
“These exports are small compared to the capacity that we need. The stage of load-shedding is high, we cannot cut off a relatively small country the same way we would for a small town. That is a decision made by the system operator.”