Eskom chairman Mteto Nyati has rebuffed suggestions that the current abatement of load shedding – South Africans haven’t had to deal with rolling blackouts for nearly a month – has to do with political pressure being applied to the power utility ahead of the 29 May election.

Nyati told television news channel Newzroom Afrika that Eskom’s ability to keep the lights on is the result of progress made in its maintenance strategy that it began implementing over a year ago – and certainly not because it is running its power stations too hard.

“That is not true,” Nyati said. “We started around March last year to implement strong planned maintenance across selected power stations within Eskom. That required us to take the pain in the short term, where we ended up having higher stages of load shedding because we had taken some this equipment [offline].”

“Now, having done a significant number of these power stations, we are starting to see that benefit of that [maintenance work].”

According to Nyati, the maintenance initiative – it is now in the second of its two-year plan – has led to a significant reduction in the need for unplanned maintenance. As a result, unplanned outages have reduced from 19GW to 13GW. The utility is working hard to reduce unplanned outages to below 10GW, he said.

Nyati said Eskom is aware of “theories” as to why Eskom has improved generation capacity, although he believes that these lack evidence to support them. He made particular reference to an opinion piece by Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen published (paywall) in the Sunday Times at the weekend, which suggested that Eskom was running its open-cycle gas turbines (OCGTs) hard to ramp up energy production, and thereby burning more diesel as a consequence.

Winter plan

“In line with our budget, we made it a point that in this financial year we halve our budget for OCGTs,” said Nyati. “Our load factor for last year was sitting at about 18%; for the current financial year – year-to-date – the load factor for OCGTs is 9%.”

According to Nyati, Eskom CEO Dan Marokane will announce the power utility’s winter plan on Friday, which will give the public insight into how bad load shedding will be this coming winter.