President Ramaphosa set to return from London on Monday following blackouts
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Wendy Mothata
18 September 2022, 20:09 [SAST]
Reading Time: 4minutes
President Cyril Ramaphosa will head back home on Monday to deal with the stage six rolling blackouts currently being implemented by Eskom.
The president has abandoned the second leg of his United States trip to return to South Africa. He was scheduled to go to New York to address the United Nations General Council after attending Queen Elizabeth the second’s funeral.
Presidential spokesperson Vincent Magwenya says, “The President has just finished an urgent virtual meeting which he convened with all the relevant Ministers and officials. This was in between attending to the lying in state of Her Majesty and the King’s reception tonight. He wanted a briefing on what led to so many units tripping taking the country back to a situation that had been managed. He further wanted to understand what could be done immediately to resolve the current state of load-shedding.”
His Excellency President @CyrilRamaphosa arrives at London Standted Airport and is received by High Commissioner Mamabolo and British Senior Government representatives. pic.twitter.com/KAb86O9LDB
Stage 6 was implemented after the tripping of a generating unit each at Kusile and Kriel power stations.
Eskom has confirmed that the country will see a high level of power cuts in the coming days.
This due to a breakdown of generating units at Kusile, Arnot, Camden and Duvha power Stations.
De Ruyter says, they will aim to access about 1 000MW from existing independent power producers like Sasol and Sappi and hopes to have it online within two weeks.
“We have units out on planned maintenance of 7062. We have unit loses and partial load losses where we are running the unit but factors constrain us from using that unit at full capacity. The system has been under pressure as everybody knows since last week, This has caused us to run our reserves and our dams very hard,” says De Ruyter .
Eskom says, one of their biggest challenges is finding funds to purchase diesel to run power stations.
De Ruyter says, they have already utilised the current financial year’s budget.
“We have 32% diesel levels at ongeluk which is too low for comfort and we need to replenish that. Its is a fact that liquidity to buy diesel is a problem, in the past 5 months of this financial year, we also burnt our way to 7.7. billion rand of diesel which is the budget for the whole year. CFO has made available an additional 500 million rand to purchase more diesel”
He says they have ruled out the possibility of sabotage being linked to the tripping of power stations across the country. Following an urgent board meeting at the weekend, Eskom will on Monday begin the process of procuring additional energy.
“At this stage, I can give the assurance that we have not seen any evidence of untoward activity leading to this spat of trips. We had a meeting yesterday which included Minister Gordon. Tomorrow we approach the market to procure whatever megawatts are available on an urgent basis. We think that we can get about1000mg from available generation capacity that we cab tap into,” He says.
It’s been a week of rolling blackouts for South Africans. However is the situation likely to get worse for households and businesses? Eskom’s General Manager for the System Operator, Isabel Fick says load shedding stage 8 is the final level of load shedding.
“Beyond stage 8 what will happen is that we as the system operators will then instruct a number of megawatts to be taken off per province. And the instruction will be carried out by the various control centres of the municipalities and distributions on the provincial bases. That’s what will happen, but we do not have any other stages beyond stage 8.”
Video: Eskom briefs the media on the current system challenges
