Eskom reached a new milestone this week, recording its longest stretch of no load shedding in five years.
The country has not experienced a blackout since March 26, 2024.
This means that South Africa has had 240 days without load shedding.
The Minister of Electricity and Energy, Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, told a media briefing on Wednesday that government’s Energy Action Plan and Eskom’s Generation Recovery Plan are working.
The minister explained that by no means is load shedding not a concern anymore.
“Load shedding is still an area that requires intervention. I have said that at the right time, when we are meant to call it, we’ll say it's over but I’m not in a position to make that firm pronouncement,” Ramokgopa said.
He also noted that government’s interventions are resilient.
“By that, I mean that even if you have a cluster of units failing, the system is able to carry itself without us having to resort to load shedding. That’s important because it means that we have built some degree of head space to allow for incidents where clusters of units fail,” he added.
Ramokgopa said that government wants to sustain this momentum and praised the current systems in place.
“The system is performing exceptionally well. It is exceeding our own expectations. We have been able to drastically reduce the amount of megawatts that are not available at any given time. In the comparable period, we were sitting at about 16,400MW not available at any given time and now we are averaging about 11,235MW.”
“There’s an improvement of that 5,000MW of the same period last year. From an Energy Availability Factor (EAF), this marks an improvement of about 7.3%,” he said.
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