Cape Town - Despite Eskom riding the “no load shedding” wave, certain communities still suffer.
South Africa has gone 154 days without load shedding.
This week, Eskom revealed that it did not anticipate having to implement load shedding in summer.
This comes after a record-breaking winter this year that saw no load shedding for the first time since 2018.
According to Eskom,the base case set for summer was for unplanned outages to be below 13 000MW, which is conservative given that unexpected outages have recently been below 10 000MW.
Even though Eskom would have enough coal-fired electricity available, in the base scenario, it would spend
R3.5 billion on diesel to run the peaking power open-cycle gas turbines.
Chief executive of Eskom Group Dan Marokane said it had not only prevented load shedding this winter but has also done so by being economical and saving more than R10bn on diesel.
“The winter performance demonstrates what this company is capable of as we undertake our further strategic initiatives and reaffirms Eskom as worthy of further future investment to serve South Africa and drive economic growth,” he said.
However, even in the absence of load shedding, Macassar community leader Waseemah Flaendorp said, residents still had problems with electricity supply.
They had been having a lot of power outages since load shedding was stopped, Flaendorp said.
“They are still struggling with Croydon's electricity as we speak. Last week we had a power failure due to an explosion at the power station in Croydon. The week before also,” she said.
Flaendorp said many residents were still without electricity because of broken meter boxes and illegal connections in informal settlements.
Residents in certain parts of Cape Town are grateful that there isn’t load shedding because it has improved their lives.
Rodney Khan, secretary of the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) social-economic development forum, said families were now able to cook and heat their water.
“I’m positive that with load shedding and the flooding, people would not have survived, so this is a relief.
“We sincerely appreciate there being no load shedding,” he said.
Khan said that since there was no longer load shedding, PHA crime fighters could identify the perpetrators of crimes in their community.
“Things could have been much worse if we had been without electricity, but thanks for no load shedding. Hence, we pray it doesn't come back very quickly,” Khan said.
Meanwhile, Eskom wants to carefully carry out recovery plans to increase generation capacity by 2 500MW by January 2025.
Bheki Nxumalo, group executive for generation at Eskom, said: “We have also established a buffer by returning extra capacity to the system.
“So when we experience delays in returning further units to the fleet, the impacts that are experienced are much less severe, and we will continue to focus on increasing the generation capacity of the fleet,” he said.
byron.lukas@inl.co.za
Cape Argus