Electricity and Energy Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has expressed optimism that the country could experience a load-shedding-free winter, despite the implementation of power cuts this week.

The minister briefed the media in Pretoria today on the status of electricity generation in the country, following Eskom’s announcement that load-shedding would be implemented during evening peak over the next few days.

He explained that additional units have been synchronised to the grid since last winter, putting Eskom in a stronger position.

“All of the things that we shared with the country regarding the winter outlook remain valid.

“In the winter outlook, we made the point that we enter winter 2025 on a much better footing than we did the winter of 2024. We are entering this winter confidently in that Koeberg Unit 2 was synchronised to the grid on December 30,  2024. Koeberg Unit 1, which is currently on outage… we are projecting that it’s going to come back in July when we’re at the peak of winter.

“We have also successfully synchronised Kusile Unit 6 to the grid in March…that’s an additional capacity on the grid, approximately 800MW,” he said.

Additionally, Medupi’s Unit 4 is also expected to be used this winter as opposed to last year.

“From a structural point of view…essentially, we’ve got 2 500MW of additional capacity [as opposed to 2024]. That’s why when we shared [the winter outlook] with the country… we were very bullish, very optimistic about the prospects of a load-shedding-free winter or at worst stage 2 load-shedding,” the minister said.

Consequence management

In a statement yesterday, Eskom explained that the implementation of load-shedding was mainly due to two factors: The delayed return of generation units from planned maintenance amounting to 3 120MW of capacity and an additional loss of 1 385MW in unplanned breakdowns.

This pushed the losses to more than 13 000MW – beyond the power utility’s limit where load-shedding can be avoided.

Ramokgopa explained that Eskom had announced it would taper down planned maintenance significantly to be able to absorb unplanned losses but had failed to do so – leading to the current situation.

“I think we’re getting to a point where there has to be consequence management if there is a promise to bring a unit by this date [and it doesn’t occur]. That’s a planning function and in this instance, we have not carried ourselves very well and that’s why you see these outage slips.

“[We must] ensure that we get the units back on track. They must generate the megawatts at the time we have made the promise because the resources were made available.”

The minister offered his apologies. “It’s really not about the engineering performance of the units. It has to do with how we were able to manage this situation. We are having difficult, hard and candid conversations with the executive team to ensure that we are not experiencing these lapses,” Ramokgopa said.  – SAnews.gov.za

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