SOUTH AFRICA - ESKOM: LOADSHEDDING MAY END FRIDAY AFTERNOON

State power utility Eskom says it will review the possibility of lifting load shedding on Friday afternoon.

This as the power utility implemented Stage 2 load shedding from Wednesday until Monday morning, following several trips at power stations and a depletion of emergency generating reserves.

Eskom Chief Executive, Andre De Ruyter, said the power utility had made progress in replenishing these reserves, however, a decision on whether to lift power outages will be taken after careful consideration.

"We will be monitoring the situation during the day and we will see how stable the system is and whether the risk is reduced to the extent where we can lift load shedding. We will not unduly delay the lifting of load shedding but we have to take a prudent decision that we can in fact lift load shedding without introducing further risk into the system," he said.

De Ruyter said the power utility was able to further recover at least 3000 MW of power back into the system since Wednesday and emergency reserves are nearly fully recovered.

"We have recovered our dams, they are essentially full. We have a few pumping hours remaining at our three major pump storage schemes. We will make that up during the day and also overnight. But essentially our pump storage reserves have recovered.

"From a diesel perspective, Gourikwa is full so we have a full availability of diesel reserves there and at Ankerlig we're currently sitting at 81%. So we're in a much better place than we were [on Wednesday]."

Eskom Chief Operations Officer, Jan Oberholzer, explained that the power utility had managed to recover an important unit at Kusile Power Station.

Furthermore, Oberholzer added that a non-commercial unit at that power station was performing well but the utility "cannot put that egg into the basket".

"Although the system has improved very positively...we will take the whole system performance into consideration. We will have some probability for possible breakdowns but we will communicate just after five today on the outlook of the system," he said.

Eskom group executive for Generation, Phillip Dukashe, said the power utility is also facing external challenges – particularly cable theft – which contribute to load shedding.

“Almost on a daily basis people are getting arrested…trying to steal copper and cables. That’s a challenge that we have to deal with but with the security levels that have increased, we are dealing with that. This has caused us a lot of challenges with units not coming back as scheduled because people have stolen cables,” Dukashe said. – SAnews.gov.za