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Waking up to Stage 6, now Eskom execs are fighting to fend off Stage 8 power cuts 

Waking up to Stage 6, now Eskom execs are fighting to fend off Stage 8 power cuts 
Ferial Haffajee
By Ferial Haffajee
18 Sep 2022
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At dawn on Sunday 18 September, the country was moved into Stage 6 power cuts as diesel reserves ran low. 

Just before 4 am on Sunday, 18 September, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter’s phone rang. It was his COO Jan Oberholzer warning that red lights were flashing across the power grid and that diesel reserves that keep emergency power going were running lower at Ankerlig, one of two  gas turbine power plants keeping the lights on as the coal-fired fleet is in its death throes. 

They pressed the button on Stage 6 (switching off or load shedding 6000 MW of electricity). So South Africans woke up to advanced power cuts that can see you lose grid electricity three times a day and more often in parts of Johannesburg where the lights go out for longer blocks of time. (Cape Town has to date generally experienced less severe cuts because of the Steenbras Dam hydro-energy facility but is also now on Stage 6.)

2022 has been the worst year for scheduled power cuts by the monopoly utility Eskom. There have been power cuts on more than 100 days in a year, 259 days old on 18 September, and the prognosis for the rest of the year is not excellent, according to Eskom’s own published schedules.  



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Oberholzer said his teams were all hands on deck and working 24 hours to bring back enough units to go back down to Stage 5 by Sunday evening, 18 September, but De Ruyter warned that the power from these units would not “make its way smoothly onto the grid by Monday”. 

If you are still on the grid, you can plan for another challenging week on the power front. Eskom has already blown R7.7-billion on buying diesel to keep the open cycle gas turbines (OCGTs) running – the budget for the entire year. 

Calib Cassim, the CFO, has scraped R500-million more from the budget to buy more, but it is likely to need a fiscal injection from National Treasury. The diesel reserves and the OCGTs are the only things standing between South Africa and Stage 8 power cuts, the last planned for in the outages that keep the grid from collapsing. 

De Ruyter said that ‘geopolitics’ (the war by Russia in Ukraine, which has caused a global energy crisis) has driven up the price of diesel, and buying it on the high seas is getting more and more expensive. “A lot of power stations are at the end of their life. We are doing the best we can with the system we have,” said De Ruyter. About half of Eskom’s installed capacity of 44,000 MW of electricity has been down through the week when power cuts have inched up a stage almost daily after a brief respite in August. The warmer weather and the lower demand at the weekend show how perilous the grid is to demand Stage 6 cuts, adding to a maintenance backlog. Eskom slows down maintenance in high-demand winter months and picks it up as the weather turns.  

City of Joburg's schedule as of 18 September, 2022



 

The system operator Isabel Fick said a ‘black-start’ test was last done on 23 August. This test checks the entire system and how it would cope with a total collapse and a slow start-up. Fick also said that South Africa only has plans for Stage 8 load shedding. After that, the system operates by taking out megawatts per province (which means you have both national and provincial load shedding to enforce much-reduced demand).



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De Ruyter said South Africa is not close to this scenario. “We are doing our level best to avoid a system breakdown. Load shedding is a tool we use to avoid a system collapse. This is not an imminent risk, but we need the support of South Africa,” he said. He said that similar cuts were being made worldwide and used the examples of the Eiffel Tower, which has cut the lights, and the blackout of electronic billboards across Europe, which is heading into a bleak winter after Russia cut gas exports. De Ruyter ruled out sabotage as a cause of the latest round of cuts.

The DA has said President Cyril Ramaphosa should cut short his trip to the US and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Monday to lead South Africa through its umpteenth power crisis. In September 2015, Ramaphosa (then deputy president) said it would take 18 months and two years for the country to deal with its energy crisis. 

How can you help? 



  • Businesses should switch on air-conditioning (heating and cooling) later and turn it off earlier or not use it at all. 

  • Turn off geysers and pool pumps.

  • Keep electricity usage as low as possible at this time.  DM


 

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