‘Highly unlikely’: Ramokgopa moves to allay fears of a 'total blackout'

Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has once again moved to allay fears of a total grid collapse amid worsening stages of load-shedding, insisting that is “highly unlikely”.

The minister made these remarks at a briefing aimed at providing more updates on the implementation of the energy action plan.

The first briefing was held last week Friday when Ramokgopa revealed that Eskom would spend about R30bn in the current financial year as it tries to lessen the severity of load-shedding.

Speaking at Friday's briefing, the minister explained why a blackout was unlikely.

“Load-shedding is an instrument meant to protect the grid so that we don't have issues of low or high frequency. Low frequency is when demand far exceeds supply and high is frequency when supply far exceeds demand. 

“So I want to give assurance to the country, and will not tire to doing it. It is highly, highly unlikely that we're going to get to a situation of a blackout. That's because the system operator maintains about 2,200 or so megawatts of reserve margin that is essentially meant to protect the grid. So that person will not take an instruction from the minister, any minister, and [even] including the president,” he said.

Ramokgopa said the ministry had “generated the best and worst case scenarios” when it came to load-shedding and measures were in place to deal with either one.

“And, yes, the worst case scenario will go beyond even stage 6. I mean it's obvious that when your unplanned capability loss factor goes beyond up and you're reaching levels of peak demand that far exceed what your projections are, and generation is significantly lower than demand, you'll reach stages that are higher than what has become the norm,” he said.

The minister gave an update on the unplanned outages and how they have significantly contributed to stage 6 load-shedding this week.

He said that as of Friday morning, Eskom's generation fleet had experienced unplanned outages amounted to 18,000MW.

“So this significantly undermines our ability to maintain load-shedding at lower stages and we know that there have been several units that are responsible for this kind of poor performance.

“On Monday, when Eskom was trying to return one of the two units that were out of operation in Kriel, the exercise resulted in the four operating units being taken out and that really rang alarm bells, essentially increasing the unplanned outages.”

Making matters worse was the fact that units at Lethabo, Thutuka and Medupi had also been out this week, Ramokgopa said.

South Africa has had stage 6 load-shedding the entire week but there was some relief on Friday when Eskom announced lower stages of power cuts until 5pm on Sunday. Stage 6 will then return.

The minister confirmed that the embattled power utility remains on track to return three units at troubled Kusile by December the latest. Combined, these three units will provide 2,100MW of power.

Units 1, 2 and 3 have been out since October 2022 while the remaining units are still being commissioned.

Ramokgopa outlined the objectives achieved since his last briefing. They are:

• Eskom has opened applications for the distribution demand management programme which provides financial incentives for demand reduction by commercial and residential customers.
• Public hearings by Nersa on the ministerial determination for three of the National Energy Crisis Committee's  initiatives on May 19. The first programme is about load-shedding, the second on cross-border purchases and the third is on emergency generation.
• Contracting has been finalised for about 400MW additional capacity through the standard offer programme set to go online before the end of May.

“We're really trying to illustrate that these are truncated processes to make it possible to get some degree of relief as we enter winter,” he said.

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