Eskom CEO André de Ruyter revealed that the power utility’s decision to cut over 3,000MW of planned maintenance over the festive season is due to a scheduling issue, not political interference.

De Ruyter explained the change while responding to questions from journalists and the public during a discussion hosted by Kieno Kammies on Waitroom.

This comes after Eskom drastically adjusted its planned maintenance schedule over Christmas and New Year’s, changing its outlook to show a substantial reduction in the risk of load-shedding over the period.

“This is a planning issue. It’s scheduling resources. It’s scheduling availability of contractors, spares, and so forth,” De Ruyter explained.

De Ruyter stated that Eskom’s decision wasn’t made to avoid load-shedding but is instead a technical decision.

“What we’ve learned over the 15 years is that if you defer maintenance in order to avoid load-shedding, it catches up with you in the most hideous way,” he said.

De Ruyter explained that Eskom must reach an “outage readiness” threshold before proceeding with planned maintenance, with necessary parts and other factors prepared ahead of time.

“We are not compromising on that, and we are not going to take units off if we haven’t reached what we call an outage readiness indicator well north of 70%, because otherwise you just waste time and money,” he said.

Therefore, the scheduling issue has forced Eskom to postpone the planned maintenance.

Two weeks ago — and for several weeks prior — Eskom’s weekly outlook showed that South Africa faced festive load-shedding for the first time ever.

Eskom’s system status outlook published in week 46

The power utility publishes a 52-week system status outlook at the start of every week, providing different load-shedding risk scenarios over the year.

Its week 46 outlook showed that Eskom would have a generation shortage of over 1,000MW — warranting at least stage 1 load-shedding — between 19 and 25 December under its “planned risk” scenario.

The “planned risk” scenario assumes 15,200MW of breakdown.

Its “likely risk” scenario showed a shortage of more than 2,001MW — warranting stage 2 load-shedding.

The risk of load-shedding over the period was high as Eskom planned to take almost 9,000MW of generation capacity offline for maintenance.

The same outlook anticipated a shortage of less than 1,000MW under the “planned risk” level and a lack of over 2,001MW for the “likely risk” level during New Year’s week (26 December 2022 to 1 January 2023).

Eskom had planned to take 10,806MW of generation capacity offline for scheduled maintenance during that week.

Eskom’s recently published system status outlook for week 47

However, Eskom’s week 47 system status outlook published last week tells a different story.

Instead of the 8,956MW of generating capacity it had planned to take offline for maintenance in the week of 19–25 December 2022, the power utility now anticipated it would only bring down 6,641MW.

The difference of 2,315MW works out to an approximate 26% reduction in planned maintenance.

Eskom’s change for New Year’s week was even more substantial, with the power utility dropping its planned maintenance by 3,269MW to 7,537MW — a decrease of 30%.

The power utility’s outlook shows that, under its planned risk scenario, it expects to have adequate capacity to meet demand during the two weeks over Christmas and New Year’s.

However, Eskom could implement stage 1 load-shedding over Christmas as its “likely risk” scenario shows that it could be 1,000MW short during the week.

It expects to have adequate capacity over New Year’s under the likely risk scenario.

André de Ruyter explains Eskom’s Christmas load-shedding miracle (mybroadband.co.za)