By EIFSA
The Economic Intervention Forum of South Africa (EIFSA) is extremely disappointed to learn about Stage 6 load shedding as announced by Eskom, to be implemented from 5am on Tuesday, September 4, until further notice.
It is of no comfort that the latest statement issued by Eskom indicates that load shedding will be reduced. This, to us points to a system that is unstable and unreliable because it makes it difficult for people to plan their lives. This comes after a few months of enduring stage one, or less of load shedding. What is more disappointing is that, even the Minister of Electricity seemed to be taken by surprise by these developments.
“This should come as no surprise and South Africans should accept the “short-term pain for long-term gain,” said Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa in his explanation of why the country has been plunged into Stage 6 load shedding.
It is clear that load shedding has been necessitated by Eskom, which is now implementing “philosophical” planned maintenance, some of which has been deferred for a long time. Rest assured South Africans, if you were to find the Minister’s speech on May/June 2023, you will hear the exact same words of “building resilience into the system”, something Eskom has clearly failed to do.
Somehow, we are expected to suddenly trust that somewhere in the undefined future, there would be resilience in the system and load-shedding would be a thing of the past. What the Minister fails to say or do is to take the nation into his confidence and share the timeline of this “short-term pain”. In addition, the Minister fails to let the country know the exact stage of load shedding that would be implemented once this “short-term pain” is over.
It is important to note that the question of when load shedding will end has never been answered by Minister nor by Eskom, neither have they pronounced plans that are put in place to reduce load shedding. Therefore, the question is; apart from the procurement of power from Independent Power Producers (IPP) that is said will come online and hopefully reduce load shedding by an unknown level, are there any concrete plans in place?
Notably, Eskom generation has a capacity outage of around 16200 megawatts (MW) today. To be more precise, that is about a third of Eskom’s capacity which is lost to unplanned outages. To put this into perspective, if you own a fleet of 100 trucks that are used to deliver coal to Eskom, only 66 of those trucks would be operational at any point in time.
It means that if Eskom’s power plant depended on you alone to stay operational; out of 24 hours, the plant would operate for only 16 hours a day as you would not have delivered enough coal. This is the type of situation Eskom expects South Africans to accept unquestionably.
This suggests that as a country, in order to get the electricity we need, we must invest in 33% more capacity and money in order to cater for unplanned outages. Instead of building a plant with two units as per projected demand, we must install a third unit, because one unit will be out at any given time due to unforeseen reasons.
In our interpretation, this is wasteful, expedient to IPPs and unconscionable to the already bleeding economy of a “developing” state.
It is important to reiterate the devastating impact of load shedding, especially on Small, Medium and Micro enterprises (SMMEs) such as laundromats, bakeries, car washes, kota joints, etc., many of which have been forced to shut down. Experts have estimated that in order to achieve any measure of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, at least an additional 10 – 15 GW of capacity needs to be installed. This is in addition to any steps taken to end load shedding.
Eskom has roughly 47000MW installed generation capacity but almost half of it is out of service, with 5894MW in planned maintenance while 16210MW is due to plants’ breakdown. If the status quo remains, Eskom may be forced to impose rolling blackouts for the next five to seven years.
Therefore, it would be advisable for Eskom to focus on fixing the current plants, as this is less time consuming and financially viable than building new ones.
In its Winter Plan of May 2023, Eskom set itself a target of ensuring that Unplanned Capability Loss Factor (UCLF) is reduced and managed below 15000MW. A target that had not been achieved at the end of August 2023. Furthermore, Eskom committed to reducing a UCLF by 6000MW over a period of 24 months, the start day of which has not been communicated.
If 6000MW were to be recovered in 24 months as per its target, Eskom believes that a 10000MW UCLF (21% capacity), which is equivalent to about 10 Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant units out of service at any given moment would be acceptable. Essentially, the country would have invested in 10 Koeberg units that would idle around without generating electricity.
Observations suggest that the primary focus is to add capacity into the system rather than fixing existing power plants. There are talks of additional 66000MW renewable energy capacity while very little is said about repairing broken plants.
EIFSA believes that any new build programmes should either be in parallel to/or subsequent to the recovery of the current available capacity.
As EIFSA, we suggest that as a first step, Eskom draws up a road map for drastically reducing the 16000MW of unplanned outages. This plan ought to illustrate a reduction in UCLF with specific timelines and the impact this move would have on load-shedding.
In his press statement on August 5, the Electricity Minister said “we do accept that in the short-term, maintenance is going to result in the possibility of intensified load shedding”.
In order for Minister’s plan to be considered credible, he needs to take the nation into his confidence and explain what the phrases “short-term” and “intensified load shedding” actually mean in relation to stages of load shedding and the duration thereof.
EIFSA is a registered organisation that was founded by a group of professionals through a twitter space, with the goal of addressing the Eskom loadshedding situation. Energy specialists, engineers, activists, and concerned citizens were among the numerous attendees from a variety of backgrounds who discussed the Eskom power crisis (what went wrong, when, who was at fault, solutions, etc.) while exchanging knowledge, experiences, and views.
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