Eskom’s generation capacity is threatened by further instability as 12 power units could stop working abruptly, creating a shortage of 4,956 megawatts.
“They can stumble at any time,” outgoing Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter told parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) on Tuesday. “Due to the inherent unreliability we are experiencing in the coal fleet, there is a high probability that load shedding will continue and that stages may change at short notice due to the potential loss of additional generation capacity.”
Eskom’s board of directors and executives appeared before Scopa, amid persistent rolling blackouts and furor over a recently passed electricity rate increase, telling lawmakers the utility expects an additional 1,400 megawatts of load losses vacuum for its Matimba power plant over the next three days.
While the parliamentary hearing was taking place, 19 interest groups filed a lawsuit in the Pretoria high court to force the state to mitigate the burden reduction crisis.
Scopa chairman Mkhuleko Hlengwa called on Eskom to provide a “road map” for when the rolling blackouts would end, noting the committee could not hold the state entity accountable without a timetable.
De Ruyter was reticent about this, arguing that not only Eskom could guarantee a sustainable energy supply. He also highlighted the ongoing corruption at Eskom and the failure of law enforcement agencies to deal with it.
“Unfortunately, corruption is the gift we simply cannot stop giving and it is with us to this day,” De Ruyter said, adding that corruption had reached such a point that when Eskom put in place control measures to monitor its coal loads, the company that oversees the monitoring was offered a bribe to gain access to the monitoring system.
“Eskom has long advocated for increased law enforcement, increased intelligence gathering and increased assistance,” he said. De Ruyter was pressured to the point where he approached private donors to run an intelligence operation to gather information on corruption.
In his presentation, De Ruyter named the six main power plants contributing to load shedding: Tutuka, Duhva, Majuba, Kusile, Matla and Kendal. Tutuka, in Mpumalanga, which he says is “characterized by very significant crime,” has power availability ranging from 15% to 17%.
“It is disappointingly low for a station that is one of the newest in the fleet,” said the outgoing Eskom boss.
Eskom officials reiterated the company’s recovery plan to recover its power availability factor from the current estimate of 58% to 70% by the end of March 2025. This will see Eskom add approximately 6,000 megawatts to the grid during a period of two years. Its goal is to add 1,862 megawatts by the end of March of this year.
Faced with criticism from Scopa that Eskom was unable to secure sufficient power supplies, the utility’s president, Mpho Makwana, said he was working “incrementally to improve the situation.”
