Eskom has control back – Molefe

12th May 2016 By: Natasha Odendaal - Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

Eskom has control back – Molefe

Eskom CEO Brian Molefe
Photo by: Duane Daws

State-owned power utility Eskom has regained control of its national electricity system after experiencing a prolonged surge in unplanned maintenance and breakdowns amid challenges to meeting demand.

Unpacking the parastatal’s quarterly State of the System briefing, CEO Brian Molefe on Thursday said immense progress had been made over the past year, with no load-shedding planned for the 2016/17 financial year.

“It no longer controls us . . . we control it,” he commented, pointing out that only a few hours of load-shedding had occurred in the past nine months.

For the “first time in a long time”, Eskom in March “broke even” on the volume of planned outages versus unplanned outages.

By May, the percentage of unplanned outages or breakdowns on the parastatal’s books had decreased to 9.2%, below the 12.7% forecast outages and this was continuing to improve.

In prior years, unplanned outages had continually surpassed that of planned shutdowns by a large margin.

This was also a step closer to Eskom’s 10% planned maintenance, 10% unplanned maintenance and 80% plant availability over the medium term.

The energy availability factor at the utility’s power stations had increased from 70% in October 2015 to 76% by April 2016, without overuse of the costly open-cycle gas turbines to meet demand, while load-shedding had been avoided for nearly nine months.

Eskom had reduced its monthly diesel use from a load factor of 21.2% costing R854-million in October 2015, to a February load factor of 1.4%, at R62-million, before dropping to a load factor of 0.4% during March and April with a price tag of R25-million.

Now, the group would continue with its ‘Tetris maintenance plan’, 2 000 MW buffer and a 8 500 MW maintenance “budget” during the winter period from April until August, after which the budget would widen to 11 500 MW as the summer plan kicked in.

“We are in a comfortable situation,” he said, noting that load-shedding this year and beyond was unlikely as the utility added more capacity.

Once completed in the next five years, Eskom’s capacity expansion programme would increase its generation capacity by 17 384 MW, transmission lines by 9 756 km and substation capacity by 42 470 MVA.

Since 2005, the capacity expansion programme had added 7 031 MW of generation capacity, 6 048 km of transmission lines and 31 590 MVA of substation capacity.