Johannesburg: While no load shedding is anticipated this summer, Eskom will continue to carry out maintenance at its plants, Group Chief Executive Brian Molefe said on Monday.

“While the system remains tight, we will continue with maintenance with no or limited load shedding,” said Molefe at a briefing on the current state of the power system.

Eskom said although summer 2015 is likely to be hotter than the previous year, it expects higher demand for electricity during the day.

“We plan to meet demand for electricity 100% of the time. We will implement stage 1 load shedding only when demand increases beyond available capacity, which at the moment is not anticipated,” said Molefe.

He said that the two hours and 20 minutes of stage 1 load shedding implemented by Eskom in September was an “extreme” incident caused by a loss of a number of generating units.

Meanwhile, key industrial customers experienced stage 2 load curtailment for five hours in October.

Eskom said it noted that there had been speculation in the media that it was not doing load shedding because it was doing load curtailment with large customers. However, Molefe said they have been able to predict the system’s stability by using the Tetris project.

“The Tetris project has resulted in better predictability. For example, a power station’s unit 6 remained on planned outage for 21 days with no load shedding. We also have unit 2 of Koeberg still on a planned outage until December,” said Molefe.

The Tetris project is a maintenance methodology that was recently introduced by Eskom. Tetris enables the power utility to perform maintenance within its budget of 4 500 MW of planned maintenance.

Molefe said during the severe heat, like the heatwave experienced in October, Eskom was able to perform maintenance without load shedding.

Meanwhile, the power utility has connected an additional 43 Independent Power Producers with a capacity of 2 147 MW to the grid, while coal stocks are at a healthy levels of 58.2 days.

Eskom will step up maintenance in December. This as a number of units, including Majuba unit 5, are on planned maintenance.

“During December, more units will be out on planned maintenance because of the low demand. We will have a maintenance festival in December, which is not a load shedding festival,” said Molefe.

Eskom uses maintenance festivals to improve the performance and reliability of its power generating units.

However, the utility will scale down the amount of maintenance it will carry out in January and this will continue to April.

“We will reduce maintenance in winter. We will again step up maintenance from the beginning of August and will continue this till the following year.”

Molefe said there had been reports that Eskom was not implementing load shedding because of reduced demand because of slow economic growth.

“The fact of the matter is that the demand profile has been the same and in fact, we see it increasing. The recent stable supply of electricity [99 days of no load shedding] has resulted in an increase in manufacturing output,” he said.

Majuba power station

Eskom said that following the storage silo collapse at the plant on 1 November 2014, progress has been made.

The utility found a short term solution that it has been implementing to give it the production capacity that was lost as a result of the collapse.

“As I speak, Majuba is operating at full capacity with the interim solution. It has been running at full capacity since February 2015,” said Molefe, adding that a new temporary conveyor belt was put in place at Majuba.

Meanwhile, the design for a permanent solution has been completed with a tender inquiry put to market.

With regards to the build programme, unit 5 of the Medupi power plant will come on in March 2018, while Kusile’s unit 1 is also expected to come on in 2018.

Drought

With the current drought impacting the country, Eskom said the water levels were healthy for production.

“In terms of the water situation, our dam levels are at a healthy 58%,” said Molefe.

Eskom Group Executive Matshela Koko said: “We receive water at 95% confidently. The 58% [level] is where we expected it to be [during] this season. Projections into the future will continue to be at 75%. The dam levels are, however, low because of the drought situation.”

Winter 2015

In winter 2015, Eskom performed three times more plant maintenance than ever before.

Molefe said the performance of the utility’s generation fleet has stabilised.

“The new build programme has delivered 720 MW to the grid. The summer projection is that there will be no load shedding,” said Molefe.

Renewable energy contributed up to 1 300 MW during the day. Eight hundred megawatts was from solar and 500 MW from wind.

SOURCE: SOUTH AFRICAN OFFICIAL NEWS