- Energy availability factor stands at 65%
- Eskom plans to boost availability to reduce the risk of load shedding
In its recent state of the system update, Eskom has revealed the current energy availability factor stands at 65%. Chief Operating Officer (COO) Jan Oberholzer stated that the unplanned outages and planned maintenance had a negative impact on capacity availability.
“In our assessment… this is poor performance. A key contributor is our planned maintenance, which had a negative impact but is positive in terms of sustainability. But then we had a number of breakdowns, and those are the issues that are really concerning us,” Oberholzer said.
The grid lost at least 2,000MW in incidents in the past few months, which have caused serious strains on the network. ” We’re dealing with a system that is extremely unreliable and unpredictable, and we’re trying our best in terms of the maintenance and other focus areas to improve this,” Oberholzer said.
Oberholzer, however, stated that Eskom is doing all within its power to increase the availability to reduce the risk of load shedding.
“So [that is] our dedicated focus and hands-on focus… If we can get that to perform at 70%, what a massive impact that will make to our energy availability factor and the contribution to lower the risk of load shedding,” he said.
According to Oberholzer, Eskom has, despite the challenges, made significant strides in coal availability and the maintenance and upgrade of the Medupi and Kusile power stations. Eskom had as of April this year, 38 256 households have been connected to the grid.