In a statement on Thursday, 31 March, the power utility said it had taken advantage of the opportunity presented by the decreased demand in electricity over the recent Easter weekend and ramped up maintenance on its generating units.
“This was done in order to improve the performance and reliability of our power generating fleet ahead of winter. Twelve scheduled maintenance outages were executed, plus an additional two outages for unplanned maintenance.
“In line with our stated aim of reducing the usage of open cycle gas turbines (OCGTs), none were used over the long weekend,” said Eskom.
Planned maintenance peaked at 10,000MW as partial load losses were low and dropped to a record 1,215MW, with an average of 1,499MW over the weekend period. On average, the total unplanned outages were below 5,000MW for the period.
“Our prognosis for the rest of the summer going into autumn and winter is that there will be no load shedding,” said Eskom.
The utility said it has now been 235 days since South Africans last experienced load shedding, with the exception of 2 hours and 20 minutes on 14 September 2015.
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