Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa
Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa on Thursday said the lights will stay on during the summer holidays.
He was speaking during the final media briefing of the year and said that if things go according to trend, “the lights will remain on, going into the near future. The trend line is positive. What we will celebrate is if we can sustain it.
“We are not seeing load-shedding because we’re aggressive on maintenance; the system is performing but the point I want to make is the consistency, because time and time again, I came to the nation and said there is a cluster of units that have failed … that is what we are trying to avert.”
There have been no power cuts since Monday because of lower demand for electricity.
Ramokgopa said the power grid has been healthier since Eskom ramped up maintenance.
“The country has about 27 700 megawatts available and demand is averaging just more than 24 000 megawatts,” Ramokgopa said, adding this was the reason there is no load-shedding at the moment.
“Eskom is actively conducting aggressive maintenance beyond the initial plans. The goal is to sustain the positive trend line so that when business resumes in January, the progress can persist,” Ramokgopa said.
Ramokgopa said Eskom is working hard to improve the energy availability factor from 55.4% to 60%, which the utility aims to reach by March 2024.
“We want to ramp that up to 60%. We haven’t reached that target. I’m sure we’ll be closer to that by March next year,” he said, adding that “Eskom’s power stations continue to be unreliable, but lessons have been learnt.”
He added that the utility had reduced its reliance on diesel because of the current electricity surplus. “Eskom was also running out of money for diesel, and if it had used the fuel to produce electricity at the same rate it had been using it in prior months, the budget would have been blown by January,” Ramokgopa said.