There have been no deliberate power cuts since April last year, state-owned electricity company Eskom said on Friday.
”Although we may have had distribution or transmission faults, we’ve had no load-shedding since April 2008,” Eskom CEO Jacob Maroga said at a media briefing held in Johannesburg.
Maroga said that last year had been an extremely challenging one for the power utility, but lessons had been learned.
”We learned that we could not put ourselves in a situation where continuous supply is compromised,” he said.
Over the last six months, Eskom had brought on line considerable capacity.
The Camden power station had become fully operational, while two units of the Grootvlei power station were now synchronised to the grid, Maroga said.
One unit of the Komati power station was also now synchronised to the grid, he added.
During the same period, two more open-cycle gas turbine units at Gourikwa power station had been commissioned.
”Based on last year’s peak demand, the reserve margin is above 8%,” Maroga said.
Peak power demand dropped to 35 959 megawatts from 36 513 megawatts in 2007, he added.
Addressing the issue of plant performance, Eskom’s CEO said that significant work had been carried out in the holiday period between December and January.
The impact of heavy rains had been managed and plant performance improved when compared with the January 2008 period.
However, there was still a lot of work to be done to enable sustainable plant performance over the next few years, Maroga said.
Turning to Eskom’s coal stocks, Maroga said that in January 2008 these stocks had been equivalent to 10 days.
However, over the past eight months, Eskom had been able to improve that figure to 38 days, Maroga said.
”Now none of our power stations has below 20 days of coal stocks — but this comes at a cost — we’ve had to deal with costs associated with buying short-term coal, but it’s a good price to pay for securing electricity supply to the country,” he said.
Eskom was the biggest consumer of coal produced in South Africa, Maroga added.
This fact, he said, showed Eskom’s enormous contribution to the country’s economy.
Addressing energy savings, the power utility’s CEO said that Eskom had forecast a 3% reduction in energy sales for the financial year 2008/9 as compared with 2007/8.
He added that the impact of the economic downturn had been seen in the shutting down of ferro-alloy and stainless-steel smelters.
”This caused a demand reduction of at least 1 500 megawatts.”
When asked about energy tariffs, Maroga said that Eskom was in the process of putting together an application.
”We want a decision by April as that is when our financial year starts,” he said. ”And the tariffs must reflect the reality of our expenditure,” he said. — Sapa