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Cape Town – Eskom’s unplanned power outages on Thursday could be roughly equated to a loss of two Medupis from the grid, an industry expert says.
Eskom ran into a severe shortage of generation capacity on Thursday as several of its power stations suffered unplanned outages.
In its system status bulletin the utility said unplanned outages were due to technical faults. Earlier, spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe told Fin24 that 27 power stations out of its fleet of 87 units were not working optimally.
“It’s almost all our power stations [that] are experiencing all sorts of problems at this stage," he said.
Eskom initiated stage three load shedding at 16:00 and will continue its rotation of cutting power from the grid until 23:00.
Two Medupis
For Thursday evening’s peak demand Eskom had an available capacity of 28 079MW including the use of open gas cycle turbines. Demand was forecast at 30 850MW leaving a deficit of 2771MW.
Eskom’s planned maintenance made provision to take 5 043MW off the power grid. This is roughly the equivalent of the amount of power that the planned Medupi power plant will push into the grid.
However unplanned outages from faulty power stations on Thursday stood at 10 424MW, the equivalent of roughly two Medupis.
An industry expert, who does not have permission to speak to the media, said Eskom is in deep trouble and that “even the first two units of Medupi and one from Kusile cannot help the scale of Eskom’s power troubles at the moment”.
READ: Stage 3: Eskom under serious strain
Stage 3 allows for up to 4 000MW of the national load to be shed and is implemented in 2 hour blocks. Users may therefore be without electricity for up to 2.5hrs.
The grid is further constrained by maintenance work being carried out on unit 1 of the Koeberg power station. The unit was taken out of service due to a technical fault on the main generator transformer. Koeberg has a generation capacity of 1 800MW.
According to Eskom it “is undergoing start-up tests required for synchronisation after the fault on the generator was resolved and is expected to return to service this [Thursday] evening”.
“We expect the unit to be back at full capacity later in the week as it does take some time to ramp it up,” Eskom said.
