Eskom biting off more than it can chew

According to independent energy analyst Pieter Jordaan, the latest plant data from Eskom shows that a significant chunk of power shortfalls over the past week boiled down to the utility’s higher levels of planned maintenance.

While the group has been taking advantage of the dip in user demand to do more maintenance – thanks to the holiday period and factories and industries still ramping up for the new year – it has been struggling to return those units to service.

“An escalation in blackouts this week, was again due to a delay in the return of units from repairs and maintenance,” Jordaan said.

“On Friday (12 January), a combined 23,400 MW, or 50% of generating capacity, was unavailable. Of this total, a whopping 7,800 GW was on planned outage (PCLF), representing 16.7% of Eskom’s fleet.”

This is significantly higher than the 12.7% PCLF at the same time last year.

“The near 2,000 MW of planned losses that did not return on time introduced 2.5 stages of unnecessary load shedding,” Jordaan said.

Eskom announced that load shedding would be pushed higher over the weekend – usually a period of low demand and no need for load shedding during the day – hitting back to stage 4. By Monday, the situation had eased, with the country sitting at stage 2 until further notice.

“Erratic schedule changes over the weekend suggest that the System Operator wanted to ensure full pumped storage reserves going into the new week after being caught short this week,” he said.

Jordaan’s analysis is in line with the views of various energy experts and analysts over the past few weeks, who have said that the sooner-than-expected push back into load shedding could have been avoided if Eskom hadn’t been so eager to push record maintenance.

The kicker comes in the fact that the maintenance has not delivered any discernable benefit to energy availability (EAF), which dipped below the 50% mark at the start of the year.

According to Jordaan, the outages are also filtering through the wider trend data, with the weekly blackout trend showing that the country was only on full power for 24% of the week, compared to 40% the week before.

“If this indicator deteriorates even further in the coming week, it would signal the build-up to a major blackout episode,” he warned.

Pointing to the annual blackout forecast for 2024, the second week of the new year added another 19.1 blackout hours to the meter, which has now accumulated 1.5 days in 2024 so far.

Last year, Week 2 contributed 61.5 hours, to accumulate 4.0 blackout days at the time – so by that measure, 2024 is off to a much better start than 2023.

On average, South Africans spent less than 30 minutes per day without power in 2021, compared to 2.25 hours in 2022 and 4.8 hours in 2023. The current blackout rate translates into 2.6 blackout hours per day, or 39.8 accumulated days for 2024.

Read: Eskom cuts load shedding to stage 2 – for now