Power crisis: the end is in sight

Eskom anticipates it won't have to resort to rolling blackouts until April next year.

Cape Town - South Africa’s power utility, Eskom Holdings, is managing maintenance at plants, helping the country avoid scheduled electricity cuts that have curbed economic growth.

“We are planning the maintenance shutdowns” to minimize disruptions, Eskom acting CEO Brian Molefe told reporters in Cape Town on Friday. “As of today we have had 28 days of no blackouts.”

Eskom anticipates it won’t have to resort to rolling blackouts, known locally as load shedding, until April next year, although the power grid remains constrained, Molefe said.

While demand is set to exceed existing supply after that, new generating units due to come online should help to reduce the shortfall, said.

Eskom, the state company that supplies about 95 percent of electricity in Africa’s most-industrialized economy, is struggling to meet demand for power after decades of underinvestment and delays in completing new plants. There have been about 100 days of managed outages this year.

The 1 332-megawatt Ingula pump storage plant will be fully synchronised with the national grid by August next year, according to Eskom. The first 800-megawatt unit at the Kusile coal-fired plant is due to come online in August 2017 and the second unit of the Medupi coal power station a month later.

While the utility has potential capacity of 44 262 megawatts, about 4 608 megawatts were out of service because of scheduled maintenance and plant faults took out another 6 757 megawatt, Eskom said. Peak demand is currently about 30 563 megawatts.

BLOOMBERG