Minister of Electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says they are making progress in improving the performance of the power stations after the energy availability factor reached 60%.
He said the last time the energy availability factor was at 60% was in September last year.
This was a significant improvement as government was trying to add more megawatts on the grid.
Ramokgopa, who was briefing the media on Friday, said the increase in the energy availability factor would mean lower stages of load shedding.
He also said they would continue to target power stations.
This was a new approach they adopted to go station by station.
He said they have targeted Kendal, Majuba, Kriel and Matla power stations to improve their energy availability factor.
Ramokgopa also said they were working on the open-cycle gas turbines to add more megawatts on the grid.
“We have teams that are trying to optimise open-cycle gas turbines to close the delta between demand and supply,” said Ramokgopa.
He said there was also a healthy project pipeline of embedded generation.
There has been an increase in applications for projects on embedded generation since the government lifted the cap from 1MW to 100MW and late last year government allowed more than 100MW projects of embedded generation from private players.
The National Energy Regulator of South Africa was processing a number of applications for these projects.
Ramokgopa said between January and March this year 27 000MW of projects were registered.
“We prefer to have these projects where there is grid capacity,” said Ramokgopa.
siyabonga.mkhwanazi@inl.co.za
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