Africa-Press – South-Africa. It’s an important point – in the midst of winter, we are able to ramp up planned maintenance,” he told a media briefing on Sunday morning.
On Friday, Eskom was able to take 4 300MW offline for maintenance, compared to 2 800MW at the start of the week.
Ramokgopa said that this winter season demand had reached a high of 31 000MW, lower than a peak of 34 000MW forecast by the utility.
Unplanned breakdowns, meanwhile, fell to below 14 000MW on Friday, down from 16 400MW at the start of the week.
Eskom’s available capacity hovered at around 29 000MW.
“Generation is beginning to keep up with demand, that is why you are able to see during significant periods of the day… we are not having load shedding,” he said.
Ramokgopa did not say when he believed the country would leave load shedding behind, saying he would not make any public pronouncements about dates.
And despite some positive signs, SA was still on track for its worst-ever year of load-shedding without “drastic improvements”, he said.
The power utility is still far from its goal of generation exceeding demand.
Transmission blues
Ramokgopa said he was increasingly focusing on bottlenecks in SA’s transmission grid, which were hampering an increase in generation capacity.
He warned that SA could not quickly build desperately-needed new capacity unless the transmission constraints were fixed, particularly in the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Eastern Cape.
“Don’t kick the can down the road – you are going to sit with a transmission problem,” he said.
“We need to make it possible for private sector players to locate in those spaces where there is grid capacity.”
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