SA confident about recovery of power stations

SOUTH African minister of electricity Kgosientsho Ramokgopa is confident that the country will continue to have lower stages of load-shedding as the power system recovers.

He says with the country exiting the winter period, the demand for energy will be lower.

The minister says the demand for energy was 33 000MW, which has dropped to 28 000MW.

Ramokgopa, who was briefing the media on the state of electricity in South Africa yesterday, said power stations continued to perform better.

This has been reflected in the increase in the energy availability factor from 48% to 60%, he said.

The situation will improve in the next few weeks as more units are put back online. These units were out for several months due to a number of factors.

Ramokgopa said the ministry is confident the system was stabilising.

“On the issue of performance, (we are) more than satisfied. We have shown where we moved from a historic low of 48% of energy availability. We have been averaging 60% energy availability factor. (When) we went to the winter period, the worst case scenario was stage 8.

“We only had 30 hours of stage 6. You can see the intensity of load-shedding is coming down. The issues of outage slips, I have shown to you, have come down from a high of 3 300MW to 766MW,” he said.

“We remain confident about our ability to resolve the load-shedding issue,” he said.

The minister said more units were coming back on stream at the Tutuka and Kusile power stations and this will increase the energy availability factor.

In the next few weeks, this will improve significantly, he said.

Ramokgopa’s briefing comes as energy Gwede Mantashe was this week expected to release the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) for 2023.

The IRP proposes different sources of energy to achieve energy security supply.

The government has said it believes coal is still part of the energy mix.

Other sources of energy include hydro, gas, nuclear, solar, wind and battery power. – IOL News