Eskom has ‘robust’ plan to ensure maintenance without load shedding

The resilience of the country’s power system was stress-tested this week following multiple trips of units at three power stations‚ which resulted in a loss of 3‚535 MW‚ Eskom says.

It added that no load shedding had been implemented due to the increased resilience that the electricity supplier had built into the power system over the past eight months.

“Eskom has a robust plan in order to ensure maintenance without load shedding. A key aspect of this includes having a strict winter and summer maintenance budget that comprises 8.5GW for winter and 11.5GW for summer. This maintenance plan is managed through the Tetris planning tool which schedule outages based on forecasted demand and maintenance requirements.

“Eskom has started to deliberately reduce planned maintenance in order to ramp up energy availability for the expected winter peak. However‚ during this period‚ we believe our capacity will be sufficient to meet demand whilst we still undertake required maintenance‚” the power parastatal added.