Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, the Minister of Electricity, said during a press conference on Sunday that the power supplier will not take shortcuts to alleviate load shedding phases.
According to him, planned maintenance is increased.
He says the downsides of planned maintenance and doing things the right way are that available capacity is removed from the grid and, if it coincides with additional units failing due to technical faults, the power supplier is exposed. “The only tool that is then available to us is to increase load shedding phases.”
According to him, this is the reason why phase 6 load shedding had to be applied in the past week.
He says Eskom aims to, if units break down unexpectedly, restore them as quickly as possible to alleviate the impact of load shedding.
“We will continue to take a prudent approach to solving this problem and we are able to justify our request for additional resources to the National Treasury.”
The advantage of planned maintenance is that the power supplier can testify “with a large degree of confidence” about the units’ ability to sustainably deliver power, if they are connected to the network after maintenance.
“As the president says, it’s short-term pain for long-term gain.”
