South Africa’s state-owned power utility Eskom is desperate to restore its capacity as the country’s aging power generation has reached Stage 6, the worst possible ranking so far in the supply chain on the electricity grid, Eskom Chief Executive Andre de Ruyter said on Monday.
A series of multiple trips, breakdowns and delays in return to service at the aging generation units nationwide have caused the implementation of Stage 6 load-shedding over the weekend, de Ruyter said.
De Ruyter said teams at coal fired power stations are “working flat out” to bring back these old generation units as quickly as they could, warning that not all units would be immediately available to feed the grid.
“We planned to bring back 1,590 MW by (Sunday) peak and then a further 3,500 MW by Monday evening. We can expect that not all of this will make its way smoothly onto the grid due to the age and condition of these units,” he admitted.
“Once they are brought back, there are very often repeat trips, which then need to be addressed,” he said.
“But I can give you the assurance that our teams are engaged and working very hard at our power stations to enable us to address the shortfall in generation capacity,” de Ruyter said.
Eskom had by Sunday lost at least 22,000MW of generation capacity due in part to units being taken offline for maintenance — but mostly from unplanned breakdowns, he said.
He added that this was half of the country’s capacity of 45,000 MW power supply on its electricity grid nationwide.
NM/as/APA