Load-shedding down to Stage 1 with Kusile back in service

The weekend will be a bit brighter for South Africans thanks to an announcement by the state-owned electricity utility Eskom that Stage 2 load-shedding, which has been in place since Wednesday, would be reduced to Stage 1 from 9pm on Friday until 5am on Monday.

Unplanned outages had decreased from about 15,000MW at the start of the week to 11,200MW by Friday morning, André de Ruyter, CEO of Eskom said during a media briefing. However, by Friday afternoon total breakdowns had increased to 13,277MW.

“While there has been an improvement in the generation capacity, and a significant recovery in the emergency generation reserves, caution is still called for as this is not sufficient to suspend load-shedding at this point,” Eskom said in a statement.

According to Eskom, since Thursday evening, a generating unit at the Kusile power station was returned to service while a unit at Hendrina had to be shut down to repair a boiler tube leak. A unit each Duvha, Kriel and Hendrina power stations were taken offline for planned maintenance.

“We will not unduly delay the lifting of load-shedding, but we need to take a prudent decision without introducing more risk,” De Ruyter said.

Generation performance at Kusile power station in Mpumalanga has been a cause of concern for Eskom. The whole plant had been mostly offline since last weekend. The plant has three commercial generation units, each capable of delivering 800MW when running at full capacity. As of Friday morning, technicians were able to bring Unit 1 on load to deliver 470MW.

Unit 4, a non-commercial unit which is still in a testing phase, was able to generate 750MW, running close to full capacity of 800MW. However, Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer said that since Unit 4 was a non-commercial unit, any generation capacity from this unit would not be added to the total “basket” when deciding about whether the system was performing well enough to lift load-shedding.

“We are in a much better position [than earlier this week], but we need to take the whole system into consideration when making a decision about whether to suspend load-shedding,” Oberholzer said.

Eskom’s head of generation, Phillip Dukashe, said though they had managed to bring Kusile Unit 1 back online, the problems that caused the unit to trip had not been fully resolved increasing the risk that it may have to be taken offline again. Eskom was still in the process of bringing Unit 2 at Kusile back on load after a 75-day planned outage, mainly to correct a boiler defect.

Unit 3 was scheduled to go offline within the next week for a similar outage as Unit 2’s for two to three months.

erasmusd@businesslive.co.za