Johannesburg - Eskom has load-shed its top executives and is searching for independent experts to tell it what’s wrong, while facing yet another week ahead of red alerts on the power system.
“It’s not a crisis,” Eskom board chairman Zola Tsotsi said on Thursday, announcing the temporary “stepping down” of the chief executive and three other executives while an independent inquiry into the utility runs for three months.
“There is no crisis. I’ll say to you what the president said, that there is no crisis. I’ll tell you what our minister has said, there is no crisis. So all of us are well aware that there is no crisis. What we have are certain challenges that we have to manage.”
The inquiry was decided on by the Eskom board, and Tsotsi emphasised that it was not an investigation, and that there was no suggestion of culpability by anyone. Rather, he said, the stepping aside of the executives was “to ensure that this process was as transparent and uninhibited as possible”.
The inquiry hasn’t been set up yet.
The board’s decision followed a meeting with Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown, who said she had expressed her frustration at the utility’s problems, and welcomed the inquiry.
Temporarily sidelined are: chief executive Tshediso Matona, the former government director-general who’s been in the job only since September and who spoke more openly about Eskom’s problems than his predecessors; Tsholofelo Molefe (executive for finance since January last year); Dan Marokane (executive for group capital since July 2013); and Matshela Koko (executive for commercial and technology since May last year).
“The board, in its quest to address the current challenges faced by Eskom, has deemed it prudent to seek an independent view on the status of, among other things: the poor performance of the generation plant; delays in bringing the new generation plant on stream; high costs of primary energy; and cash-flow challenges,” Tsotsi explained.
The sidelined executives do not include the current and former executives for generation, but those responsible for finance and primary energy.
The move seemed to catch everyone by surprise, with political parties critical but apparently confused.
A governance expert, who did not want to be named, said he had never heard of executives being sidelined during an inquiry unless there was a suspicion of their wrongdoing.
Energy expert Professor Trevor Gaunt of the University of Cape Town called the move a knee-jerk reaction that was too little too late as there were so many deep-seated problems in the utility.
“It’s almost like being on the Titanic. We hit the iceberg ages ago, but now we’re finding that the life rafts don’t work either.”
On Tuesday, Eskom is expected to come up for discussion at the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) routine electricity sub-committee meeting.
“It caught us all by surprise, so we are going to have to find a way of slotting it within our schedule,” said Nersa’s Thembani Bukula, who chairs that subcommittee.
Eskom has been battling generation problems for months, with Matona having warned of load shedding for years to come, and is facing an increasingly hostile public.
The utility has spent billions of rand trying to keep the lights on by running the very expensive diesel-powered generators, which weren’t designed for such extensive use.
Throughout Tsotsi’s briefing, the power alert on the Eskom website was logged as red, meaning the supply was “under severe strain”, and by late Thursday the utility was warning of an “extremely constrained” system.
Load shedding looks likely again next week, as Eskom’s prediction is that there won’t be enough power to meet the demand on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday; predictions for the rest of the week aren’t available yet.
Over recent weeks, Eskom’s system reports have noted several occasions when peak demand “was reduced” (load shedding) to fit in with existing supply “considering primary energy constraints”, hinting at not enough money to pay for diesel.
Since October, power station breakdowns have routinely been taking more than 7 000MW off the grid, which Matona previously said was due to years of failure to keep to maintenance schedules.
The margin between actual generating capacity and peak demand has been less than 500MW on nearly half the days since February 1.
Alarmingly, the system has been so tight over recent weeks, due to the endless breakdowns, that on Friday February 20 there was a margin of just 2MW between actual generating capacity and actual peak demand.
The following Monday was even worse, with a system crash apparently narrowly avoided, when peak demand outstripped available capacity by 20MW, which Eskom dealt with through “interrupted load supply”, understood to involve turning off a big customer.
The Star