Kaya 959 Reporter
Eskom is boosting power cuts to avoid a total grid collapse as concerns such as a lack of imports and outages at its coal-fired units worsen.
Due to a “major deficit” of generation, the utility, which generates almost all of the country’s electricity, plans to boost the amount of power it cuts from the system to 3 000 megawatts on Monday, Chief Executive Officer Andre de Ruyter told reporters in an online briefing.
De Ruyter said that “Extraordinary measures” are needed to improve the system, and that. “the performance has been quite disappointing.”
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Kaya Biz with Gugulethu Mfuphi spoke to Mike Russow, CEO at Independent Energy Thought Leaders, who gave his perspective on the ongoing energy crisis in South Africa.
Russow said Eskom has failed to maintain the utility’s plants and is suffering the consequences.
“The situation for me is kind of straightforward, unfortunately, Eskom and its executives have failed to recognise the situation.”
“The problem is very simple, Eskom has failed to maintain the plant in a proper manner and consequently, the machines are breaking down, every single day, in fact, they are currently at the worst possible state of energy availability of their fleet ever.”
Eskom’s Chief Operating Officer Jan Oberholzer said “about 36% of total installed capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns and some planned maintenance and power cuts could be increased to 4 000 megawatts if more units are lost, “
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