Africa-Press – South-Africa. Johannesburg – Eskom chief executive Andre de Ruyter admitted on Wednesday that some of the power utility’s planned maintenance has not achieved its objectives, hence load shedding returned this week for the first time this year.
De Ruyter was speaking during Eskom’s virtual briefing on its current system challenges.
”A lot of the planned maintenance that was carried out did not meet all of our expectations in terms of the issues that were addressed due to inadequate front end loading of those projects.
“These are major outages and typically take a number of months; they require spares, long lead spares to be ordered for months in advance,” he said.
De Ruyter blamed this partly on inadequate project management as well as liquidity challenges that have constrained Eskom’s ability to place orders upfront for those long lead items so that the entity has them available before commencing with an outage.
”It’s certainly disappointing that we were not able to make a bigger dent in this unreliable system of ours to ensure that we could carry out more planned maintenance successfully,” he said.
According to De Ruyter, Eskom’s unplanned load losses from its units out of production total 8 093 megawatts (MW) with partial load losses of 5 368MW.
”In total it’s 13 461MW of capacity that is unavailable due to unplanned outages. We obviously regret this and we are working hard to bring units back as quickly as possible,” he said.
De Ruyter added: “We are hoping to reduce the extent of load shedding as much as we can but unfortunately in this instance we had no alternative but to implement this decision.”
Meanwhile the City of Cape Town said in the next two weeks it will publish documents detailing its planned procurement of power from independent power producers (IPPs).
In a statement the city said it will include the announcement of tenders for the purchase of electricity from IPPs and time lines for bringing IPP-generated electricity into the City’s supply network.
“It has become clear to the City of Cape Town that if we wish to halt the damage caused by Eskom’s monopoly over electricity generation, we have to take matters into our own hands. The only way for us to provide reliable and affordable electricity to our residents is to source it from elsewhere,“ said the statement
Political Bureau
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