On Thursday, Eskom announced a heavy schedule of power cuts that will mean there will be just 13 days between now and the end of April without a scheduled outage.
The power utility's briefing also included updates on new projects, including Kusile, Medupi and Ingula.
Following the briefing, Professor Anton Eberhard, an energy specialist at the University of Cape Town, tweeted:
"Hidden in today's presentation by Eskom is further bad news: Ingula now due in 2016 and Kusile 1st unit only 2017. We know Medupi is late. But much needed Ingula peaking power is also delayed. Very little new capacity will be added in the next two years. It's not widely understood that Eskom has lost more power capacity over the past year (eg Duvha, Majuba) than it will build in next 2 years."
Eskom CEO Tshediso Matona said that the Medupi power station's first unit, which was supposed to undergo synchronisation with the grid in December, would now be synchronised only later this year. Kusile's first unit is expected to come online only in 2017.
The Ingula pumped storage scheme, a hydroelectric plant near Ladysmith which is to supply 1332MW of power to the grid once completed, will only come online next year.
Eskom said that over the past few months between 5000MW and 9000MW of power had been lost to unplanned maintenance and breakdowns.
Matona said that Eskom, in a bid to "keep the lights on" over the past seven years, had ignored maintenance on some of its plants. This could no longer be sustained and the utility could "no longer ignore the health of our plants".
Because summer is also Eskom's peak maintenance season, power generation is set to become even more severely constrained over the next few months with planned shutdowns at Koeberg, Komati, Camden and Grootvlei power stations between now and June.
Energy specialist Chris Yelland said Eskom needed to create about 5000MW of space to allow for maintenance - much of which would initially come from power cuts.
"At the moment, supply and demand are almost the same, and in order to achieve those 5000MW of space, we will need stage three load-shedding almost every day," he said.
Yelland said the timetables shown by Eskom only went up to April, but cuts were likely to go beyond that as the Eskom "war room" scrambled to find power using the five-point plan announced by the cabinet last year.
Among these were plans to decrease the amount of diesel used in favour of gas, retrofitting government and private buildings with energyefficient technology and cogeneration agreements. Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa was tasked with overseeing the turnaround.
When the cabinet announced the plan in December, a 30-day deadline was placed on some of the steps. Ramaphosa's spokesman, Ronnie Mamoepa, said that "at this stage we are unable to comment on the process". Ramaphosa reportedly toured the Eskom war room on Thursday.
Source: Sunday Times
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