Johannesburg – Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter has issued a stern warning to South Africans that there could be a possible load shedding due to unplanned capacity loss.
De Ruyter said although the embattled power utility is making strives to deal with infrastructure setbacks, outages might occur.
He unpacked Eskom challenges on Thursday, where he said the national power supplier’s major projects and outages are going to be undertaken this year and will increase the risk of load-shedding.
“Systems will be constrained by that reduced contribution of our most competitive and also our most reliable plants and that means there is still a risk of load shedding that remains in the system,” warned de Ruyter.
Recently, Eskom announced that the replacement of steam generators at the Koeberg nuclear power station is set to cost R20bn.
“Despite our good performance in recent weeks, particularly over the festive season, surpassing that of the previous quarter and the same period in 2020, much needs to be done for Eskom to achieve operational sustainability and ensure energy security for SA,” he addressed.
He further added that Koeberg would be going on a refueling outage taking off 720 MW from the system.
De Ruyter said it’s still a long way to go for Eskom to effectively be sustainable, as load-shedding will continue to be a factor.
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