Eskom brings loadshedding back

The South African minister of electricity and energy, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has assured his nationals that the country will overcome the current bout of load shedding crisis by the end of the week.

The minister, along with Eskom executives, were briefing the media on Sunday to provide an update on the status of South Africa’s electricity generation performance.

The briefing followed an announcement by Eskom that it had implemented Stage 6 load shedding as of half past one, pre-dawn on Sunday morning.

“I'm confident that by the end of the week, we should be out of this difficult situation. We are confident we're going to go to conditions of normality. By the end of the week there will not be [any] load shedding. We would have gone through this wave and of course, we want the country to get accustomed to being normal. And in fact, something called load shedding should be considered extremely abnormal,” Ramokgopa said.



Stage 3 to Stage 6 overnight

Sunday’s briefing came after the national power utility had previously said in a social media post: “Eskom regrets to announce that Stage 6 load shedding was implemented at 1:30am due to multiple unit trips at Camden Power Station and will continue until further notice. This measure followed the implementation of Stage 3, necessitated by multiple unit trips at Majuba Power Station and a unit trip at Medupi that resulted in a loss of 3 864 MW in generation capacity, while planned maintenance accounted for 7 506 MW.” In the social media post on X, Eskom said Stage 6 load shedding was necessary to, “replenish emergency reserves and prepare for the week ahead.”

On Saturday, the power utility had already implemented Stage 3 load shedding.

“Following over 20 days of uninterrupted electricity supply, Eskom has encountered another temporary setback. As a result, Stage 3 load shedding will be implemented from today at 17:30 until further notice,” it said at the time.



Transformer overload

On Sunday the minister explained that despite 300 consecutive days of uninterrupted power supply, recent setbacks occurred, including the loss of five generation units at Majuba and four units at Camden power stations. Eskom CEO Dan Marokane said out of the 10 units lost overnight, six were back online.

“We have five to six units that are planned to come back in operation during the course of today and we will take stock just after 8 o’clock in the evening, after the evening peak. Our teams are very focused on returning these units,” Marokane told the media at the briefing in Pretoria.

He said the loss of multiple units at the Majuba power station was occasioned by an overload on a transformer.

Marokane also said when they checked the situation at Majuba on Saturday, it coincided with the trip to Medupi power station which had to do with the underfrequency in the network. At Majuba, five units were lost but two were brought back online by 6:00 on Sunday, as well as one at Camden. The power utility would proceed to bring the rest of the units back into operation.

“Essentially, what really pushed us into the position that we found ourselves [in] having to initiate load shedding at very short notice yesterday at 5:30 pm was the loss of multiple units at Majuba power station. This was occasioned by initially an overload on a transformer as a result of the startup of a unit that was coming out of a long-term outage and that essentially started the domino effect of reticulation supply cutting to the rest of the units. And one by one, those units gave in,” he explained.

He added that, “we have understood the exact nature of how the event came about, and we are able to isolate it overnight and start addressing it. Of course, in the coming week, we will be diving deeper into ensuring that, from a system design perspective, we are able to contain such occurrences going forth. And we'll also assess where else the rest may be lying in our fleet,” the CEO said.



Apology

Meanwhile, the minister apologised for the recent setback and explained the efforts to address the load shedding issue. “Let me also say at the onset that I want on behalf of the government, and the leadership of Eskom, to express our regret and convey our apology to the rest of the country. The fact that we are experiencing load shedding and secondly, that we are experiencing the intensity of load shedding that we haven’t experienced in a long time. The levels of agitation, levels of anger and disappointment are understood because we are really on a journey to ensure that indeed ultimately, we are able to eradicate load shedding,” the minister said. He said that the setback was regrettable as was previous the one that occurred earlier this month.

The South African electricity minister explained that it was important to share how the country got to Stage 6 load shedding. First, he explained that his department and Eskom are guided by the Energy Action Plan that the president outlined in July 2022, of which one of its outcomes is to fix Eskom. The minister emphasised that there was no sabotage involved on the basis of evidence at their disposal. "I want to say to the rest of the country; the evidence that is before us is that this is a technical issue. I am making this point because we must not find any reasons to manufacture explanations of why we are at Stage 6 and point fingers somewhere else,” he said.



Back to stage 4

Yesterday Eskom announced that load shedding will be reduced to Stage 4 until further notice. "This follows the successful recovery of all five units at Majuba, two units at Camden, and one unit at Medupi since Saturday, totaling eight out of ten generation units that had tripped this weekend. Additionally, emergency reserves replenishment is progressing well. The return of these units comes after identifying the root causes of multiple unit trips, which were unconnected and purely technical in nature, related to electrical and control system issues in auxiliary parts of these power stations. Planned maintenance stands at 7 706MW," Eskom said via social media.