Eskom ends its capacity hoodoo

Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has revealed that a significant milestone was achieved by Eskom with available capacity reaching 35000MW, a level of available capacity that has not been seen for six years, specifically since July 16, 2018.

This means Eskom has an operational margin of 13.9% above the evening peak demand of 30 740MW, and thus is getting closer to the international benchmark of having a 15% margin above the evening peak.

During a media briefing on Monday, Ramokgopa said that six power stations recorded an Energy Availability Factor (EAF) greater than 70%. The facilities are Medupi, Kusile, Matla, Matimba, Grootvlei, and Lethabo, while an additional four power stations achieved an EAF above 60%.

The improvement in plant performance is reflected in the EAF which was 67.68% in week 29 this year, compared with only 49.99% in week 15 last year. The improvement is also reflected in the drop of the share of non-Eskom generation in total generation to 12.2% in May from 14.8% in February.

This meant that unplanned outages of the generation units averaged at 9 841MW during the past seven days compared with 16 467MW in the corresponding week last year.

The improved plant resulted in no diesel being burnt in Open Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGT) in the past week.

“The improvement in plant performance has been phenomenal and way beyond our expectations. Remember that our best winter scenario was to have 14 000MW in unplanned outages yet we have achieved 9 841MW. That has meant we have used R9 billion less in diesel which has reduced the cost of generation,” Ramokgopa said.

Eskom’s expenditure on OCGTs between April 1 and July 25 this year was R3.37bn, generating 493.16 gigawatt hours (GWh), approximately 73% (R9.09bn) less than the R12.46bn spent last year over the same period for 2 072.87GWh.

The electricity grid has been running more than 123 days without load shedding, as the last day of load shedding was on March 26 this year, for five hours.

Ramokgopa said that now that the problem of load shedding has largely been addressed, the focus of the ministry would turn to distribution and load reduction.

He noted that despite the National Treasury making significant annual contributions to municipalities for the purpose of Free Basic Electricity (FBE), the distribution of these subsidies to vulnerable households is not prioritised.

In 2019, 10 million households were funded by the national budget to receive FBE, however, only 2 million received the subsidy.

Ramokgopa said that some of the reasons for this disparity included low indigent households’ registration with municipalities for FBE. In addition, he noted that electricity consumption levels have changed significantly since the 50 kilowatt hours (kWh) monthly allocation was determined in 2005.

The current allocation is insufficient, and warranted a review, tied into off-grid solutions.

An integrated national subsidy framework in line with the Electricity Pricing Policy is required to guide the application of tariff subsidies, further enabling the balance of subsidy impacts on the price and affordability of electricity to recipients and contributors.

A clear framework is necessary to address equity concerns, prevent unintended subsidies, and promote a fair distribution of costs among different customer categories.

There remains a backlog in household electrification; that is, around 14% of South African households are neither connected to the grid nor supplied with electricity via off-grid solutions.

While micro-grid solutions, particularly in rural areas, are possible, for such solutions to be used more widely, an appropriate pricing framework needs to be developed.

Cape Times