Africa-Press – South-Africa. South Africans breathed a collective sigh of relief when loadshedding apparently came to an end almost two years ago already.
However, according to performance data for 2025 obtained from Eskom, the picture is more sobering that it appears, reports the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism.
While the situation has improved, says amaBhungane, 40% of Eskom’s coal fleet still spent half of 2025 offline – either doing maintenance or , “more often”, fixing unexpected breakdowns.
This data is not publicly available, they explain, but the power utility provided the data to them in 2021 and has kept up the tradition “in the spirit of transparency”.
Eskom’s official target is an energy availability factor (EAF) of 80%.
According to the data, last year it achieved a combined 62%, up from 59% in 2024 and 55% in 2023. However, when one looks at coal in isolation, the EAF drops to 58% in 2025.
Stephen Grootes gets more context from energy analyst Chris Yelland, managing director of EE Business Intelligence.
Yelland points out that there are quite a few coal-fired power stations that are actually not in service at the moment, because demand for electricity is pretty low, and Eskom has placed some generating units at various facilities into what is known as “cold reserve”.
This means they are switched off, but are technically available if it’s found necessary to start them.
“There’s quite a significant amount of that and, in addition, as the article points out, if you look at the average EAF for 2025 and take off the non-coal-fired plants, the availability factor drops to 58% for those units which is still a long way from where it should be.”
Commenting on speculation around the dramatic improvement in the EAF for the last weeks of 2025, Yelland says he believes this is down to the fact of the high level of the units in cold reserve.
“You must understand that if a unit’s in cold reserve it is not on – it’s considered to be available, but if it had to be switched on and actually operate, you may find that there’s a boiler tube leak and it may have to be switched off. If they’re not actually operating, they’re not being stress tested as it were – they’re sitting there idle, so you don’t really know the true level of availability.”
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