ELECTRICITY and Energy Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Friday as Eskom continued to make significant strides in improvement, South Africa was not behind load shedding.
Briefing the portfolio committee on Eskom’s 2023/24 financial year annual report, Ramokgopa said the entity had, during the financial year under review, been unable to deliver on its basic and primary mandate to provide sufficient megawatts to support the South African economy.
“The period delivered the most intense load shedding in the history of its existence. Eskom grappled significant headwinds,” he said.
However, Ramokgopa said the Eskom team continue to make significant significant strides.
“Like we said load shedding is not behind us and as I speak to you, the system is under serious strain, but the point we make is that we are moving in the right direction.
“I think the examination should be a trend line over an extended period of time,” he said.
The minister also said said there was bound to be periods of setbacks as it was being currently the case.
“We are going through turbulent waters as I speak on the generation front, but the team is doing everything possible to keep lights on and support the South African economy.
“When load shedding is behind us, myself and the chair of Eskom will stand before the country and make that pronouncement,” Ramokgopa said.
In keeping with their message, Eskom CEO Dan Marokane stated that they might have to switch back to load shedding in order to safeguard the system’s integrity if unplanned outages reached a certain threshold.
“This week has been quite tough. We had multiple unit trips at two big power stations early this week. We are trying to bring back those online during the weekend,” Marokane said.
“We had to rely on our reserves to keep ourselves going, but we need to replenish those reserves this weekend,” he said.
He warned that there was high risk of load shedding after more than 200 days of being without power outages.
“We always understood this risk may happen but needed to manage. We are firmly on our path to a point of comfort,” he said, announcing that there will be a briefing in the afternoon.
Marokane noted that the 2023/24 financial year was dominated by intense and frequent load shedding.
Amid planned availability declining to 54.56%, the 329 days of load shedding translated to a loss before tax of R25.5 billion.
“That loss is significant and showed improvement with revision of R10bn (profit).”
The debt owed by municipalities escalated from R58 billion to R74.4 billion.
“That number has now gone above R90 billion. It is likely to end at R100 billion and it needs urgent attention,” he said.
Eskom board chairperson Mteto Nyati said the results for 2023/24 showed that they poorly performed.
Nyati mentioned the record number of 329 days of load shedding, something he said they were not proud of.
“What we are proud of is that we made a conscious decision to do planned maintenance in that financial year.”
Nyati noted that their turnaround plan had focused on operations, financial, and sustainability issues.
The power utility came up with a generation recovery plan, which he termed as their “north star” for the last 18 months.
“It is the thing that is going to take us out of load shedding. It is two years, from March 2023, that’s coming up at the end of March 2025. By that time, we would like to be in a position to come together with the minister and inform South Africa that load shedding is behind us, but there are still some actions we have to take between now and then, and we need to make sure those action are done and done properly,” he said.
Nyati stated a turnaround was not a straight line as there would be setbacks and that there will be a need to adjust their plans.
“Those setbacks should not be interpreted as us going back to how things used to be, but certainly we have a team that is doing all it can to get us to a point where we can say load shedding is behind us,” he said.
Nyati noted that Nersa approved a 12.74% electricity tariff increase for the next three years that was not nowhere to what they asked for.
“We understand we are operating under a new reality where the citizens say we need to be getting increases aligned to inflation… We need to be able to live within our means,” he said.
