Eskom scrambles after downgrade
|Published
File photo: Dean Hutton/Bloomberg. File photo: Dean Hutton/Bloomberg.
Johannesburg - On Friday, there’s yet another crisis meeting on Eskom as the embattled utility deals with a credit rating downgrade to junk status, a near-crash of the grid, and another week of not enough power.
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa summoned business leaders to the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Friday morning to discuss the Eskom problem.
The Presidency said Ramaphosa would brief the business sector on the government’s interventions to turn Eskom around, arising from his cabinet mandate.
“The meeting will also be attended by various government ministers, technical experts based at the government’s war room, as well as members of the Eskom advisory panel appointed by deputy president Ramaphosa to advise him on challenges facing Eskom,” said the Presidency.
“The deputy president believes that there is no shortcut to the challenges facing Eskom.
“Accordingly, there is a need to develop short-, medium- and long-term solutions that are independently verifiable by people with expert knowledge in the energy sector.”
The news is unlikely to be encouraging for the business sector.
On Thursday, ratings agency Standard and Poor’s slashed Eskom’s long-term ratings to junk or non-investment grade.
On Thursday night Eskom’s routine prediction of the state of the grid for the upcoming week was gloomy.
While weekends usually provide a bit of a breathing space, the grid is under such strain that Eskom has predicted it won’t have enough power to meet the expected demand on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Planned maintenance is running at 3 621MW, but breakdowns are more than double that at 7 668MW.
Public confidence in the utility took a big blow on Thursday last week when the Eskom board suspended chief executive Tshidiso Matona and three other executives, and announced a three-month inquiry into Eskom’s problems.
While the board emphasised that the executives hadn’t done anything wrong and there was no “investigation”, the explanations for the move were vague and caused endless speculation.
On the same day of the suspensions, Eskom had a bad day with the grid.
“Peak demand of 31 643MW met by available capacity of 31 627MW (including open cycle gas turbines),” said Eskom’s System Status Bulletin for that period, a shortfall of 16MW.
And in order to cope, Eskom essentially booted at least one big customer off the grid.
“On days when demand is higher than supply, we had contracted demand reductions from virtual power stations as well as the interruptible load supply which gives us sufficient capacity for a generating plant to meet demand,” said Eskom in response to The Star’s queries about what happened.
Eskom would not respond to further queries on this or provide an explanation for the VPS and ILS.
The Star