Eskom has reached a new milestone having recorded its longest stretch of not implementing load shedding in five years.
South Africa has not experienced planned rolling blackouts since 26 March this year.
Minister of Electricity and Energy, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, told a media briefing that this is an indication that government's Energy Action Plan, coupled with Eskom's Generation Recovery Plan, is showing resilience.
"This means two things: load shedding is still an area that requires intervention. I have said that at the right time, when we are meant to call it, we'll [say] its over but I'm not in a position to make that firm pronouncement.
"The second message this conveys is that the interventions are resilient. By that I mean that even if you have a cluster of units failing, the system is able to carry itself without us having to resort to load shedding. That's important because it means that we have built some degree head space to allow for incidents where clusters of units fail," he said.
The Minister emphasised that although the interventions are bearing fruit, "we want to sustain this momentum".
"The system is performing exceptionally well. It is exceeding our own expectations.
"We have been able to drastically reduce the amount of megawatts that are not available at any given time. In the comparable period, we were sitting at about 16 400MW not available at any given time and now we are averaging about 11 235MW.
"There's an improvement of that 5000MW of the same period last year. From an Energy Availability Factor, this marks an improvement of about 7.3%," he said.
Ramokgopa highlighted that Eskom has spent at least R15 billion less than last year.
"That's significant going into the future because these savings are going to be factored into the cost of electricity supply. So going into the future we'll know that the primary energy, we were able to reduce that cost by R15 billion.
"We are doing this as we maintain the health of the system. We are not compromising on our planned maintenance so in terms of our summer outlook, we are at about 6900MW of planned maintenance," he said.
Draft Integrated Resource Plan 2023 (IRP 2023)
Ramokgopa told the media briefing that in terms of the Draft IRP 2023 stakeholder engagements, some 4338 public comments have been received while three rounds of public consultations and at least 26 other virtual and in-person engagements with civil society, industry, academia and government entities took place.
"Of these 4000 plus comments, 136 of these were substantive. There are people who were challenging a number of aspects or making suggestions on how best we can improve this model," he said.
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The Draft IRP is described by the department as South Africa's electricity generation plan which lays out plans to ensure security of electricity supply by balancing supply with demand, while taking into account the environment and total cost of supply.
"Then next step is that we are deepening that conversation. So we are not [re]starting the public consultation...we are going back to those people who made those substantive submissions having done some degree of revision on the back of the submissions that we have received.
"We will have a physical engagement some time next week and we will have the targeted engagements. We will then consolidate those inputs," he said.
A report emanating from consolidated inputs will then be tabled before Cabinet which will make a final decision on the plan.
