Eskom CEO says risk of grid collapse is low

Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter says the power utility does not anticipate reaching stage 8 and that the risk of a total grid collapse is very low.

De Ruyter, along with other Eskom officials, was briefing the media about the challenges that prompted another bout of stage 6 blackouts on Saturday night.

He said stage 6 would continue until Wednesday evening and be reduced to stage 4 on Thursday.

“Just to reiterate... the reason that we implement load-shedding in the first instance is to allow us to maintain a 50 hertz frequency on the grid. If we were to lose that frequency because of a shortage of generation capacity, we will then have a total grid collapse and that will take anything from 10 to 14 days to resolve and will no doubt have very severe negative impact,” De Ruyter said.

He said load-shedding was the lever Eskom was using to protect the system form a “total blackout”.

De Ruyter said he had been assured by the national system’s operator, Isabelle Fik, that the probability of a total system blackout “remains very low because we have the levers of load-shedding but also the support of our major industrial and mining customers in managing demand during peaks”.

“We have contingency plans in place should there be further loss in generation capacity. At this point in time we do not anticipate that there is a risk of going beyond stage 8. So that is part of our contingency planning that is in place. I want to do everything in our power to ensure that we do not end up in a situation where we go beyond that,” De Ruyter said.

De Ruyter said during the system’s update, there were 22,877MW of generation capacity offline. He said full load losses of 12,018MW were the main reason for the stage 6 load-shedding and partial losses of 5,993MW.

He said evening peak forecast was 27,782MW, adding there was a shortfall of 5,834MW.

“More than a 1,000MW shortfall equates to one stage of load-shedding, which is why you see we need to implement stage 6,” he said.