Parliament told Eskom needs two things before ‘ultimate certainty’ load shedding is over

27 Feb 2025

Eskom CEO Dan Marokane told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts the utility would need to meet its targeted goal for reliability as well as additional generation capacity before declaring load shedding permanently over.

On Thursday evening, Eskom CEO Dan Marokane confirmed in no uncertain terms that the country is “not out of the woods yet” and that the utility needed to meet two objectives before it could definitively declare an end to load shedding.

He was responding to questions from members of Parliament at a sitting of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa).

Marokane, whose tenure began in March 2023, set the scene by looking back nearly two years. He said that in April 2023, the board, with management, assessed the operational challenges in Eskom’s generation business and came up with the generation recovery plan.

That, he explained, “was to be implemented over a two-year period to take us from the energy availability factor (EAF) levels that were as low down as 55% at the time, targeting 70%” from April 2025.

The adoption of that plan also meant that Eskom’s maintenance strategies had to be “adapted to catch up” with long overdue maintenance, said the chief executive.

In the summer of 2023 going into 2024, Eskom carried out deep maintenance, “one of the highest levels of maintenance”.

He explained that, “It is on the back of the deep maintenance that we actually had 311 days of no load shedding that we experienced.”

Marokane emphasised that load shedding remained a stalking threat.

“Even when we experienced 300 days of no load shedding, we maintained a position that says ‘we are not out of the woods yet,’ and we repeat that today.”

Daily Maverick recently reported on how energy analysts questioned the seeming incongruence between the tone of Eskom’s recent public messaging about the state of the energy system and the reality evidenced in its data following the sudden imposition of Stage 6 load shedding this weekend.

Read more: Data vs spin — did Eskom mislead South Africans about the load shedding risk?

“We are not out of the woods yet,” Marokane repeated at Thursday’s hearing, explaining that they would need two things “to get to a point of ultimate certainty”.

“In the first instance is the results from your maintenance work that take you to the EAF that you require … it’s also the elimination of unreliability … trips do happen.”

He said that the first condition was that Eskom needed to reach both an EAF of 70% and to have that 70% available reliably.

The second thing Eskom would need before it could declare load shedding over was additional generating capacity “to absorb the shocks when they do happen … last week was one kind of a shock like that”.

Deputy Minister of Electricity and Energy Samantha Graham shared her account of the recent load shedding “shock” in her opening address to the Scopa.

She said that despite the “voice notes, the theories, the conspiracy theorists, the grandstanders all coming up with individual stories as to why load shedding happened”, the reason the country was suddenly plunged into load shedding was because of Eskom’s deep maintenance leaving “very little room to play if things go wrong”.

So the second thing Eskom would need to definitively declare an end to load shedding was more “room to play”.

Marokane explained that the utility wanted to get to a point “where we have maintenance progressing as it is and sustained improvements on reliability in terms of managing the trips” as well as bringing on board an additional 2,500MW of capacity.

This would be in the form of Koeberg unit 2, Kusile unit 6 “which we will bring into synchronisation in the next two weeks” and Medupi unit 4, which was damaged three years ago.

“When you have this combination, you will be better placed to start taking a view around whether the question of load shedding is fully behind you.”

Marokane said that when they finished this “cycle of deep maintenance” and from the end of March, when many of these units began coming back online, Eskom would get back to “a comfort level that helped us manage the long period of no load shedding”.

“We dare not say now that we have arrived.” DM

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