Business and Technology

Eskom denies lying about load-shedding

Eskom has denied using load reduction to hide the amount of load-shedding it is implementing in South Africa. Following similar allegations in October 2020 and June 2021, energy analyst Ted Blom has again claimed the power utility is being devious in its communication to the public around load-shedding.

Blom said he had received information that showed Eskom actually had an electricity shortage that would require stage 1 load-shedding on Tuesday 10 August, despite the utility not announcing load-shedding. According to this information, Eskom was short of 900MW of power during peak usage on that evening.

“Because it wasn’t 1,000MW, they didn’t announce load-shedding,” he said. Eskom hit back at the allegations and denied that there was any shortfall.

“The operating reserve, including all OCGTs, was 1355MW. There was no shortfall. Additional emergency reserves were available for other reserve categories,” the utility stated.

The tweet below from Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha shows the peak usage statistics on Tuesday, 10 August. Blom maintains that Eskom has understated the severity of load-shedding for many years, going back to 2001.

Just about every night for the last two years, Eskom has been understating [the level of load-shedding],” Blom said. He said Eskom either didn’t understand the rules or was deliberately lying to the public. I have evidence from suburbs that were load-shed,” Blom stated.

MyBroadband asked Blom which neighbourhoods exactly were being load-shed outside of the stated schedules.

He did not provide specific details but explained that Eskom’s load reduction practice was actually load-shedding in disguise. Under new management, Eskom is artificially differentiating between load-shedding and load reduction,” Blom said. As far as I am concerned, that is another lie, where they are surreptitiously introducing load-shedding under the banner of load reduction,” Blom said.

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Source: mybroadband