Eskom anticipates that South Africa will experience a "load shedding free summer" if it manages to keep unplanned losses at power stations below 13 000MW.
This is according to the power utility's Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) Dan Marokane who briefed the media on the state of Eskom and Summer Plan on Monday.
"Our view is that if we keep the unplanned losses below 13 000MW, we should have a load shedding free summer. At worst, we anticipate that in the event that unplanned losses reaches up to 15 500MW, we will at most experience Stage 2 [load shedding].
"The performance over the last four months has consistently hovered around unplanned losses of 12 000MW. Our power station managers and our teams are very alive to that, their focus is on controlling unplanned losses and should we stay below 13 000MW, we should have a comfortable summer," Marokane explained.
The GCEO added that over the coming months, more generation capacity is expected to come online from power stations.
"That 2500MW [of added capacity] will add significant margins to our reserves and once we have that, together with the sustained performance that we are seeing, we should get into a conversation sooner in the New Year, by March, as to when we can essentially indicate that from our perspective, load shedding at the chronic level that it was, is now behind us," Marokane said.
He noted the dramatically improved generation performance but warned that the level of performance must be sustained throughout the entire business.
"There's been a structural shift in the performance of our coal fleet. That structural shift is evidenced in the reduction of unplanned outages...and from the performance of 152 days without load shedding.
"In contrast to where we were last December sends a signal that something, fundamentally, has shifted and it is all on the back of the generation recovery plan.
"The performance...has been above expectation and it is beefed by the interventions we have executed from a generation recovery plan. This performance needs to be institutionalised so that our ways of working as a business do not go back to where we were," he said.
