Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa.

• SA should be spared from load shedding over the festive season, the country’s electricity minister has said.
• Demand is below supply, despite an increase in “aggressive maintenance”.
• The maintenance is to ready power stations for the return of industry in January.
• For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.

“We will have a festive season with the lights on,” Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Thursday.

The country has about 27 700 megawatts available and demand is averaging just more than 24 000 megawatts, Ramokgopa said during a briefing. That’s why we’re not seeing load shedding right now, he said.

Load shedding is currently suspended until at least Friday afternoon. While Ramakgopa would not be drawn on how long this would last, he did intimate that the real test for electricity supply would be in the new year, when industry returns.

“The lights will remain on, going into the near future. The trend line is positive. What we will celebrate is if we can sustain it.”

Losses fell below 11 000 megawatts from 18 December, but the point is to maintain this, the minister said. Eskom is carrying out “aggressive maintenance” and adding extra maintenance in addition to what was already planned, so that when business picks up again in January, the positive trend line can be sustained, Ramokgopa said.

While he was cautiously upbeat, 2023 has been SA’s worst-ever year of power outages. Eskom’s recently released interim results showed plant performance had continued to decline, that municipal arrears had climbed almost R12 billion to R70 billion in just six months, profit was half of what it was a year earlier and Eskom’s debt burden – R442.7 billion at the end of September – was still rising.

Read: Almost everything at Eskom went from bad to worse in recent months, results show

Looking back on 2023, Ramokgopa said one of the lowlights was the energy availability factor – the percentage of Eskom’s plants available to deliver energy – which was 55.4%.

“We want to ramp that up to 60%. We haven’t reached that target. I’m sure we’ll be closer to that by March next year,” he said.

Eskom’s power stations continue to be unreliable, but lessons have been learnt, according to the minister.

The delays in returning Koeberg unit 1 to service have also taught the team how to avoid some of the same issues as Unit 2 of the nuclear power plant goes offline for refurbishment.

The burning of diesel to run its emergency generation fleet is expensive and unsustainable, says Ramokgopa. Of late, this has dropped significantly because of the current electricity surplus. Eskom was also running out of money for diesel, and if it had carried on using the fuel to produce electricity at the same rate it had been using it in prior months, the budget would have been blown by January.       

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There are about 66 gigawatts of renewable energy projects at various stages, although not all of them will come to fruition. But every megawatt counts, Ramokgopa said.