South Africa's 100 Days Without Load-Shedding Are a Maintenance Dividend, Not Yet a Secure System
On 5 July 2024 Eskom announced that South Africa had gone 100 consecutive days without load-shedding, counting from 26 March. The last comparable stretch was between September and December 2020. Eskom attributed the result to its Generation Operational Recovery Plan, started in March 2023, and to an aggressive planned maintenance programme made possible by the National Treasury's debt relief arrangement. The year-to-date energy availability factor for 1 April to 4 July 2024 was 61.5 per cent, against 54.56 per cent in the same period of 2023.
The weekly figure for 1 to 4 July was 65.7 per cent, and unplanned outages over the previous seven days averaged about 12,180 MW. For a country that lived through record rationing in 2023, this is a genuine improvement, and the political mood has shifted accordingly. Eskom says its targeted initiatives reduced unplanned losses on the generation fleet from about 18,000 MW to an average of around 12,000 MW since May 2023. When Eskom is starved of cash, maintenance is the first thing to be cut, which produces breakdowns, which produces load-shedding and diesel spending in open-cycle gas turbines, which drains cash further.
It aims to recover about 1,600 MW from the coal fleet following the commercial operation of Kusile Unit 5 and to bring back 930 MW from Koeberg Unit 2 before the end of the calendar year. The Minerals Council noted that the level remains below the peaks of 2019 to 2021 and well short of the 75 per cent assumed in the Integrated Resource Plan. Two years of severe load-shedding pushed households and firms to install rooftop solar, batteries and diesel generators.
The Minerals Council observed that the availability factor typically peaks between May and July and then declines towards the end of the year, as maintenance is scheduled outside winter. South Africa has earned a reprieve through maintenance and better operations, helped by Treasury money and by temporarily weaker demand.