South Africans could be living without load shedding this winter, if acting Eskom CEO Brian Molefe gets his way.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“[There will be] no planned load shedding this winter,” he said, according to an Eskom tweet.<\/p>\n
\u201cLimited maintenance will be done during this period as most work was done in summer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Winter officially starts on June 1, this coming Monday.<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s economy has been hammered by seven months of power cuts, reflected by snail pace GDP growth in the first quarter of 2015 of 1.3% year-on-year.<\/p>\n
A silo collapse at one of the country\u2019s youngest power plants (Majuba), delays in Eskom\u2019s build programme (Medupi and Kusile) and an intense maintenance programme (including work on Koeberg) resulted in a shortage of power supply to meet the country\u2019s demand.<\/p>\n
With Koeberg\u2019s unit 1 coming back online on Saturday or Sunday and Medupi\u2019s unit 6 starting to generate its full capacity, Eskom is confident that it will be able to carry out its mandate to supply electricity to all South Africans.<\/p>\n
\u201cKoeberg unit 1 will be returned back to service this weekend after a three-month planned shutdown for refuelling,\u201d Molefe said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMedupi unit 6 reached an 800MW milestone this week, helping to stabilise the power grid and avoiding load shedding yesterday [on Thursday],\u201d Eskom tweeted. \u201cTests continue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eskom spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe told Fin24 on Friday that Eskom\u2019s mandate was not to load shed, but to provide reliable electricity to the country. \u201cWe don\u2019t go out of our way to do load shedding,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe chances of load shedding this weekend are not high,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n