I know you know it’s bad.

When the lights go out, throughout the weekend and into Monday, you know it’s a mess.

Last week we covered the so-called Eskom ‘death spiral’ in eight minutes flat, which worked in a little humour to ease the pain.

Sorry to be all Debbie Downer, but the Moneyweb piece titled “What Eskom is not telling us” lacks those chuckles, and hits where it hurts most.

First up, the disaster that was this past weekend:

We now know that the dramatic and chaotic escalation of load shedding on Saturday – from Stage 2 to Stage 3 and then Stage 4 within hours – was caused by the loss of imports of 1 100 megawatts (MW) of power from Mozambique. Tropical cyclone Idai damaged the transmission lines that carry power to South Africa from Cahora Bassa.

Eskom has to maintain an operating reserve of 2 000MW at all times, hence the need from Saturday to curtail load through load shedding (which is, effectively, managed blackouts).

That points to a much larger problem, and the announcement that at least Stage Two load shedding will run until at least the middle of this week is a new low for the power provider.

We’re all celebrating the fact that Thursday is a public holiday, and so are Eskom, although that’s not going to solve anything in the long run.

The numbers are a complete mess, and this is just a facepalm:

What Eskom hasn’t said explicitly is that it relied (heavily) on its pumped storage schemes to keep the lights on during Saturday. These schemes – Drakensberg, Ingula and Palmiet – together (nominally) produce 2 724MW. They are not intended to produce base-load power for the simple reason that they are net users of electricity!

In other words, they use more power than they produce.

A real short term ‘fix’, long-term shot in the foot, there.

As for the coal plant performance numbers, here’s the gist of it:

Even at a generous 20 000MW, the electricity available from Eskom’s coal fleet is barely 52% of the ±38 599MW nominal capacity. At 19 000MW available from coal, it drops below 50%. The utility keeps saying that available generation capacity availability is 67% (versus a 80% target), with a reported energy availability factor (EAF) of ±62%.

In its core coal fleet, the numbers are horrifyingly worse. And it’s this story that Eskom isn’t telling (and won’t).

OK, so that probably requires a little bit of an understanding of how Eskom and its power generation systems work, but let’s keep it simple.

BusinessTech says that the biggest problem facing Eskom “is its inability to build up an emergency electricity margin”, quoting the Department of Public Enterprises spokesperson, Adrian Lackay.

If there are no reserves sitting in supply, we are only always moments from load shedding:

“They have installed capacity of some 45,000MW, the country needs about 29,000 – 30,000MW per day, but because of the poor state of our plant fleet, we hardly reach 30,000 a day.

“If we can get to 31,000 or 32,000MW a day then you have 2,000 – 3,000MW reserve margin which can bail you out of a crisis when one hits, but Eskom has lost this capability.”

One more dire warning? Sure, why not – here’s energy expert Chris Yelland speaking to EWN:

[He] says that stage four load shedding on a weekend is unprecedented and the situation needs urgent attention.

Yelland said the situation has reached crisis levels.

“It should never happen that you have stage 4 load shedding in summer months when electricity demand is low, on a Saturday; it’s truly startling and a huge crisis.”

In summer, on a weekend, and we hit stage four.

It’s bad, friends, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting much better any time soon.

Happy Monday.

[sources:moneyweb&bustech&ewn]