Eskom says South Africa has now gone 525 consecutive days without load shedding. The power utility says its energy availability factor, a measure of how much of its fleet is available to generate, is 68.1% for the financial year to date, up from 62.48% a year earlier.
Eskom described this as the highest financial year-to-date figure in six years. The figures are Eskom's own and we have not yet verified them independently.
What Eskom says the numbers show
Eskom says it has about 6,424MW more available capacity than three years ago. It says average unplanned outages fell by 7,064MW over that period, from 16,172MW to 9,108MW, and that unplanned outages improved 6.89% year on year, returning about 3,115MW to service.
On diesel, Eskom says spending on open-cycle gas turbines fell by R4.81 billion, or 79.2%, to R1.26 billion from R6.07 billion. It says generation from those turbines fell by almost 84% compared with the previous financial year. Eskom says nearly 5,000MW of spare capacity is available above demand.
Koeberg Unit 1 and the caveats
Eskom says Koeberg Unit 1 was resynchronised to the grid on 20 October after an electrical disturbance during maintenance testing. It says the protection systems worked as designed and that "no nuclear safety concerns arose from the event."
Eskom says its focus is now on sustaining the gains and moving from recovery to reliability and sustainability. The availability factor is a financial year-to-date measure, not a calendar-year figure, and a run of days without load shedding is not a guarantee about future supply.
