Minister Confirms Eskom Advancing Toward Goal Of Ending Load Shedding In South Africa

South Africa has not experienced load shedding since May this year.

The minister was speaking during a media briefing to update the nation on the state of the electricity grid.

Moving in right direction

“We are in a good space. We are moving in the right direction. We made the promise that we are going to address this situation, and we made the promise that we are confident of our technical ability to resolve what many thought was an intractable challenge.

“We are within that touching distance,” Ramokgopa said.

The minister said Eskom does not “expect any major surprises in relation to the performance of the grid” for the remainder of the winter and the subsequent transition to the warmer months.

“Of course, this is a dynamic system. These are rotating units, and there could be challenges here and there. However, the grid is designed in such a manner where we can call upon the peaking plants to help us to sustain the performance of the grid without relying on load shedding.

“(The peaking plants) are a card we have when are in major challenges… to keep the lights on,” he said.

Before the winter season, Eskom had warned that load shedding would be implemented in a situation where unplanned outages went beyond 13,000MW.

“We are doing substantially better than that. We are beginning to see that the system is stable, resilient and becoming more reliable as we move on.

“The unplanned outages of the generating units average about 10,880MW over the past seven days, (and) we have seen that even going below 10,000MW. I really want to congratulate the… 42,000 plus men and women at Eskom for being able to keep their shoulder to the wheel and transfix on the resolution of what is essentially an existential crisis (facing) the country.

Nearly out of the woods

“We are more than confident that we are getting out of the woods,” he said.

Between April and 8 August , power stations have been operating with an Energy Availability Factor (EAF) that has reached 60.14%.

“This is major progress that we are making, if you look at where the performance was. If we go back to 2023, when we initiated this intervention, it was substantially lower… we are coming from a low of about 49%.

“The past 14 days or so… the EAF is continuing to give us spectacular results. At some point, we even breached the 70% mark in relation to performance of the EAF. The average month to date… we are sitting at 65.38%.

“We had made the promise to the country that we are going to experience short-term pain… We said we know what we are doing. Most of the country… believed in us and we are happy to say we are delivering against the promise that we have made and, in some instances, we are delivering more than what we had promised,” Ramokgopa said.

The minister noted that during some periods, Eskom has been generating more electricity than is demanded.

“There are periods during the week… where we have to put machines in cold reserve, meaning… we are generating more than what the demand is, and to protect the grid, we must pull back some of the machines.

“That says... we have now created sufficient space and headroom for the economy to grow on the back of this performance. We are marching and we are going to get out of the woods,” Ramokgopa said.