Excerpt from esi-africa.com
Despite historic declines in economic activity in 2020, South Africa still saw a high intensity of loadshedding. The trend of increasing hours of loadshedding has continued into most of 2021. At Eskom, the problem of unreliable generation capacity gets exacerbated by operational issues, resulting in unplanned outages at multiple generation plants – primarily because of a lack of maintenance. Eskom’s ageing fleet of power stations and unplanned outages have hurt the power producer’s generation capacity for years, and these constraints remain a challenge for future growth.
Increasing loadshedding days since 2018 highlights the challenges that Eskom faces – a constrained power system with an old unreliable and poorly maintained generation fleet and the need for new generation capacity. Until undertaking investment in substantial new power capacity, the risk of loadshedding will remain.