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Load shedding will be here to stay for many years yet, but the short-term outlook for load shedding is more positive than was thought just a few weeks back.

Reports from April stated that Eskom’s repair efforts had struggled during lockdown, with both parts and skilled specialists in short supply.

Speaking earlier today at a media briefing, Eskom chief operations officer Jan Oberholzer said that Eskom was able to carry out  “a great deal more short-term opportunistic maintenance”, which addressed some of the most pressing issues related to national power supply.

Below from IOL:

…Oberholzer said today that the impact of Covid-19, and especially the lockdown, had reduced demand by an average of 6 000 megawatts (MW) up to a maximum of 11 000MW.

Oberholzer said this had created the opportunity to execute additional short term maintenance to address emergent issues, including those that were contributing to partial load losses.

“Before we had the lockdown, we forecasted 31 days of Stage 1 loadshedding. We are now forecasting 3 days of Stage 1 loadshedding over the winter period that is coming. However, I need to say that is based on an 80 percent probability,” Oberholzer said.

To spell that out clearly, Eskom’s outlook for the winter season is that there will only be three days of stage one load shedding expected.

That outlook is subject to change, but is still good news.

In addition, both stage one and stage two of load shedding would likely only take place in the evening peak (between 5PM and 8PM), which reduces the impact on the economy.

Sounds like a good excuse to show some support for a local restaurant and order in. If you don’t support them now, there’s a good chance they won’t be around further down the line.

Eskom provided a summary of its system performance via its Twitter account:

Obviously, when it comes to Eskom, it’s never going to be all good news, and CEO Andre de Ruyter was honest about the challenges the power utility faces.

These were also summarised on Eskom’s Twitter account:

De Ruyter added that whilst lockdown had hindered certain repair efforts, especially those with regards to long-term maintenance, Eskom was ready to start when restrictions eased, stating “there is the seed of an opportunity to recover that will germinate into a stronger and more reliable Eskom going forward”.

We can only hope.

To finish on a positive, Eskom outlined progress it had made in each of the five key elements of turning the ship around:

[sources:iol&businessday]