Today is day 80, without loadshedding
and Eskom CEO, Dan Marokane, said unplanned outages are consistently around 12 Gigawatts GW (with a low of 9.5GW at one point).
This is below the winter planning assumption of 15.5GW which would trigger up to Stage 2 loadshedding on some days.
This emerged at yesterday’s reflections of the new CEO’s 100 days in office.
Marokane said his first 100 days in office, have focused on addressing Eskom’s business challenges and repositioning the power utility for growth and sustainability.
This has included the assessment of the effectiveness of the Generation Operational Recovery Plan and reviewing the progress on the implementation of Eskom’s unbundling progress.
“This performance comes from a sustained multi-dimensional program consisting of adequate human resources, aggressive planned maintenance on the back of financial certainty, the use of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) for critical systems, and the progressive implementation of interventions in response to the VGBe findings.”
He said improved performance has also had a positive impact on Eskom’s Financials, given the significant year-on-year reduction in the usage of diesel through Open-Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGTs), translating to over R4 billion in savings in the current financial year.
The unbundling of the business is forging ahead, with plans to operationalize the National Transmission Company of South Africa (NTCSA) on the 1 July 2024, following the fulfilment of the suspensive conditions at the end of March 2024. As part of incorporating the lessons learnt from the unbundling of the transmission business, Eskom is concluding the process of augmenting internal resources with external support for the focused unbundling project management unit to drive efficiencies for the remainder of the program.
This expected to enable a faster execution of the unbundling process.
“We are putting the building blocks in place to rebuild trust and credibility in Eskom through transparent performance, with the intent to re-affirm the company as worthy of further future investment as we undertake our strategic initiatives. It is our intention to remain a critical player in South Africa’s evolving future energy market” Marokane said.
Over the next 36 months, Eskom will add value in increasing the Energy Availability Factor (EAF) to 70%. Another 2.5GW is expected to be returned to the grid by March 2025.
About 2GW of clean energy projects is also expected to come on stream by 2026, in the organization’s bid to accelerate the Just Transition.
Picture: Dan Marokane at Enlit Africa Conference last month.