More than a third of Eskom’s generating units were in breakdown on Wednesday, pushing SA into stage 4 load-shedding for the first time this year, highlighting the risks to the fragile economic recovery from unreliable power supply.
SA has experienced loadshedding since 2008, but breakdowns are increasing with Eskom’s energy availability factor on an unrelenting declining trend, which is not expected to change in the short term.
Over the past nine years Eskom’s energy availability factor (EAF) – the percentage of its power available for dispatch – has deteriorated from 84.59% in 2011 to 66.64% in 2020.
Over the past week, Eskom’s energy availability factor was 64.78%. Energy analyst Chris Yelland, who tracks Eskom’s EAF closely, said the trend so far for 2021 was significantly lower than 2020.
On Wednesday, 15 generating units were out, including two units of Eskom’s newest power stations Medupi unit 5 and Kusile unit 1. Each stage of load-shedding is equivalent to dropping 1,000MW from the grid, which is necessary to avoid it becoming overloaded resulting in a complete blackout. Stage 4 loadshedding entails 4,000MW to be shed from the grid. Average electricity demand is in the region of 30,000MW.
The only city partly protected from stage 4 load-shedding on Wednesday was Cape Town, which was able to keep the city on stage 3 for Wednesday afternoon, switching to stage 4 for the evening peak.
The city has, for the most part, reduced load- shedding by 1,000MW compared to other cities, by using its Steenbras pumped-storage power station to supplement Eskom. The city is also forging ahead to secure supplies from independent power producers, which will enable it to reduce load-shedding further in the future.
Business Unity SA (Busa) described Wednesday’s loadshedding announcement as “devastating” for the economy and said it had rolled back Tuesday’s optimism, generated by higher than expected GDP growth numbers. The government was still not showing the required urgency to solve the energy crisis, it said.
The latest spike in power cuts came on the same day that separate surveys by Rand Merchant Bank and the Bureau for Economic Research at Stellenbosch
University, and the SA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, showed a jump in business confidence to levels before the Covid-19 outbreak. In addition to the slow implementation of reforms, economists have cited load-shedding and the potential for stricter Covid-19 restrictions among the biggest impediments to a sustained recovery.
The Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), the country’s long-term energy plan, had been gazetted 20 months ago, but still not a single megawatt had been procured, said Busa.
The plan was also out of date as it assumed a far higher energy availability factor than Eskom has been able to achieve, with the implication that the energy gap was much higher than anticipated.
The IRP assumed a shortterm gap of 2,000MW, which led to the so-called emergency power procurement of 2,000MW announced in March. However, it is now likely that the emergency procurement round will be delayed as an unsuccessful bidder has taken the department of energy to court, claiming corruption by government officials.
Busa called again for the lifting of the licence exemptions for embedded generation by companies wishing to generate power for their own use or for sale to plants of up to 50MW. Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe has proposed a 10MW limit. The proposal, which was put out for public comment, will now be deliberated by the government.
Hiking embedded generation is the quickest way to bring more megawatts on to the grid.
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