Wear warm clothes this winter: Eskom
The Democratic Alliance has accused power utility Eskom, of breaking its promise to keep the lights on during winter.
Having avoided load shedding for 10 successive days, Eskom has reverted back to a daily schedule this week – citing shortages of generation capacity as a result of technical faults at some units.
The utility said load shedding was necessary to ensure maintenance is carried out and that load shedding could be implemented at short notice.
DA shadow minister of public enterprises, Natasha Mazzone said that last month, Eskom spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe led South Africans to believe that no load shedding would take place in winter.
“Eskom’s long-term plan was to reduce planned outages. Because of machines expected to come back online, Eskom, therefore, thinks it will be able to meet the winter demand,” Phasiwe said.
“Winter in many households actually starts after April, with some people starting to use heaters as we speak, but officially [it starts] from 1 June,” he said.
At the end of May, acting Eskom CEO Brian Molefe said that South Africans could be living without load shedding this winter.
Speaking at the launch of the Transnet Development Hub on Friday, Molefe said planned maintenance was completed and so the utility was able to generate more power to meet the increased demand.
“[There will be] no planned load shedding this winter,” he said, according to an Eskom tweet.
“Limited maintenance will be done during this period as most work was done in summer,” he said.
South Africans were told to use electricity sparingly, to light fires and wear warm clothes, Mazzone said.
“South African people should not be expected to accept this flip-flopping by Eskom. We are repeatedly told about maintenance upgrades and constrained power systems. Despite the promises of a winter free of load shedding, very little has changed.”
At a MyBroadband Conference in Midrand on Tuesday, energy expert Chris Yelland told delegates that he is concerned over a growing lack of transparency within the new exco at Eskom, including the new acting CEO.
“I see excos trying to put in new spin – poor communication with customers is growing as this utility goes into defensive mode…we see a reduction in the utilities operational transparency,” Yelland said.
He pointed to the fact that Eskom cancelled its bi-weekly system status bulletin in May after 346 issues, without explanation.
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