South Africa should have enough electricity available by 9pm on Friday to avoid evening load shedding, Eskom said on Friday.
However, this all depended on the success of attempts to fix both the break in transmission from Mozambique and the country’s own units knocked out of service, said spokesperson Tony Stott.
South Africa usually received in the region of 1 500MW from Mozambique, he said.
He said the Songo sub-station usually took the electricity from the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric project and fed it into the transmission line into South Africa.
The shortage arose from problems feeding electricity into the transmission network — which Eskom earlier attributed to poor weather conditions on the Mozambican side.
Stott said technicians were testing the systems that had been fixed before 5pm.
They had indicated that, if their repairs were successful, electricity could be restored by about 9pm, ”probably only after our afternoon peak”, he said.
The problem had been exacerbated by a shortage of about 2 700MW of electricity produced by South Africa itself because of a lot of seasonal maintenance of power stations.
At the moment, South Africa had 13 or 14 coal-fired power stations with about 50 power units each.
Four or five of these units had unexpectedly shut down in the past few days for repairs arising from normal operational wear and tear.
While some units could accommodate repairs without shutting down, others could not, said Stott.
South Africa’s use of a national electricity network made it a national problem when this sort of situation arose and, as a result, load shedding was done throughout the country.
Until now, this has involved rolling power cuts of two to three hours at a time.
Eskom said it was using all its emergency energy resources, including gas turbines, and buying back power from large industrial customers, which had alleviated the problem.
It had also been lessened, but not eliminated, by the repair and return to service of some of the units, and it was hoped more would be back on line later on Friday night.
”If that happens, then we won’t have to do any more load shedding,” said Stott, adding that Eskom hoped there would be no need for load shedding over the weekend.
”That presupposes we get power back from Cahora Bassa and that presupposes that we don’t get problems at any stations,” he said.
Eskom has already announced that electricity is tight and will remain so for the next five to seven years until new power stations come into operation in 2012.
Stott said that apart from Mozambique, South Africa also imported electricity from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but not as much.
Municipalities have advised homeowners to switch off non-essential items, including geysers and pool pumps, in peak hours, from 7am to 10am and 6pm to 9pm. Businesses have been asked to turn off non-essential lighting and equipment. — Sapa