Warning over dark days ahead in South Africa

Eskom says it will take six years to stabilise South Africa’s electricity grid and make it reliable, requiring intense levels of maintenance, which will invariably impact energy availability.

Briefing the Portfolio Committee on Electricity and Energy on Wednesday (14 May) about the winter outlook, Eskom said that high levels of maintenance and the unreliability of units was the cause of load shedding returning this week.

However, as part of its generation recovery plan adopted in 2024, it is working to service the grid so that it can return to optimal performance. But this will take a long time.

Eskom said that the the primary cause of load shedding in the country is the poor maintenance of the coal fleet over the years.

This has led to frequent trips and unplanned outages, and low levels of reliability, even when bringing units back from maintenance.

The group said that the reason it needs six years to resolve this is because it needs the space and money to take units offline and get them back to high-quality performance and reliability.

“The amount of space is limited because you can’t take too many machines off at once without seriously affecting load shedding,” it said.

“So this is a six-year programme, and we knew that from the start – it’s going to take a while.”

The group said that the six year programme is not an arbitrary target, likening it to the service regime of a vehicle.

Units need a specific amount of time offline to fully service, and different intervals require different types of maintenance (replacing small parts, big parts, etc).

When applied across its coal fleet, this works out to be six years to go through this cycle, it said.

Eskom said that there was a remarkable improvement in the fleet in 2024, which saw South Africa without load shedding for around nine months.

In November 2024, however, the improving trend was going flat.

At the time, the group said it started seeing a lot of trips and units not coming back quick enough or reliably, and it found that spare parts management was a major contributor to this.

This is now becoming a focus area for the group, along with a focus on reliability, rarther than the performance of the big units.

Between January and March 2025, when load shedding made an unwelcome return, systems data showed negative trends in reliability, forcing the board to act.

In the past, Eskom said that sourced external help from engineering firms for support, however it found that this was not the right approach.

It now looks for skills at other utilities where people have experience with running coal plants.

“These plants rely more on experiences people than on qualified people, and we don’t have sufficient experience in the power plants,” it said.

“We will continue to monitor the recovery plan, with leading indicators on reliability.”

Load shedding can return in an instant

The key takeaway from Eskom’s remarks is that without reliability, the group cannot accurately predict what is to come.

This was clearly demonstrated this week. After setting a base-case expectation for no load shedding this winter, the utility announced three days of peak-hour load shedding from Tuesday through to Thursday.

According to Eskom CEO, Dan Marokane, the utility has now seen six such setbacks this year.

He acknowledged that this has to do with the reliability mentioned before, where units are not coming back online from maintenance fast enough, or staying online reliably.

Previous instances of load shedding were due to multiple units going offline at once on top of high levels of maintenance being performed.

Marokane said that the group is doing more maintenance than in previous years — approximately 4% more than in 2024 — in a bid to “catch up” on the neglect of previous years.

He noted that maintenance is currently being reduced, with current levels around 5,000MW, down from 7,000MW previously. It should be below 5,000MW by the end of the month.

Eskom’s winter outlook makes provision for load shedding to occur, with its ‘worst case’ seeing 21 days of load shedding, not exceeding stage 2.

For the situation where outages can be maintained below 13,000MW, load shedding will be avoided, Marokane said.

“Last year it was 14,000MW and we were able to carry on without load shedding. Where outages exceed 15,000MW, we are likely to have stage 2 load shedding, which is what happened this week.”

While Marokane is confident that Eskom will be able to maintain outages below the 13,000MW level to avoid more load shedding, energy experts are not as sure.

Speaking to 702, IMPOWER energy expert Matthew Cruise said that more load shedding in the coming months is almost certain, warning that it could reach as high as Stage 4.

Over the longer term, until the current fleet becomes more reliable or new capacity is added to provide enough of a buffer to consistently meet demand, South Africans can expect the country’s electricty issues to persist.