South Africa’s power utility may have to increase power cuts to record stage eight levels this winter, the power utility warned in a media briefing on Thursday.
Eskom Group Executive for Transmission, Segomoco Scheppers, said the winter outlook is "tight", and any significant outage slips will have a knock-on effect that will influence the parastatal's energy plan.
"Despite several positive developments to address Eskom's challenges, load shedding has intensified with a devastating impact on our economy," Scheppers said.
"The winter outlook indicates an increased risk of supply shortfall against expected demand, with our worst-case scenario indicating that load shedding could intensify to stage eight, if our interventions are unsuccessful," he said.
Eskom has not gone beyond stage six load shedding, which requires 6000 megawatts to be shed from the national grid.
He said efforts to reduce and end load shedding required the country to drive interventions both on the supply side by improving available generation and on the demand side by reducing peak demand.
Eskom said in its State of the Grid presentation that efforts to reduce and end load-shedding required the country to drive interventions both on the supply side by improving available generation and on the demand side by reducing peak demand.
He said Eskom was committed to increasing the amount of available generation, with a specific focus over the winter period by:
- Reducing unplanned losses in the generation fleet
- Managing planned maintenance to the minimum level of maintenance required over winter
- Increasing diesel burn at the open cycle gas turbines (OCGT)
- Driving the Generation Operational Recovery Programme with the board to sustainably recover the performance of the plants over the next 24 months.
According to Eskom, 2022 experienced the highest levels of load-shedding that reduced GDP growth by 5%, leading to growth of just 2.1% and costing the economy R300bn.
