Breakdowns at Eskom’s power plants have reduced to 11,224MW, and planned maintenance is 7,030MW of capacity, the power utility announced on Thursday. This 18,254MW of total electricity generation downtime is a tremendous improvement from last Friday, when close to 21,798MW of Eskom’s generating capacity was unavailable.
According to Eskom, total unavailability over the past week peaked at close to 22,500MW. Eskom head of maintenance Paula Goatley told City Press that she hadn’t seen such massive unavailability figures in a long time.
Unplanned outages have decreased by a whopping 6,689MW from the 17,933MW of breakdowns reported last week Tuesday. Load-shedding late last week was caused by a breakdown of one unit at Eskom’s Tutuka power station and Kendall power station’s inability to generate power due to a broken coal conveyor.
The problems Eskom faced this week included:
A major incident in Zambia resulted in the imported power from Cahora Bassa being reduced by 1,000MW.
A Tutuka generator tripped.
Generation units at the Medupi and Matla power stations tripped.
A unit at Tutuka power station was forced to shut down.
Three units at Kendal went offline following a power fault with its coal conveyor belt.
There were further delays in returning a unit each at Lethabo and Majuba power stations.
There is a shortage of diesel to run the open-cycle gas turbines, limiting Eskom’s ability to generate additional emergency power.
Eskom’s statement about the generation capacity improvements followed an online media briefing where CEO André de Ruyter said that load-shedding would be reduced from stage 3 to stage 2 at noon on Thursday.
The power utility expects to suspend rotational power cuts entirely from Friday at 05:00.
Eskom said it could suspend load-shedding early because many of the units that had suffered breakdowns over the past two weeks had returned to service.
It has also seen sufficient recovery in emergency generation reserves. The improved demand response for different stages of load-shedding has also enabled faster than anticipated recovery,” Eskom stated.
Source: mybroadband
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