During Thursday’s media briefing, Eskom revealed the amount of money it spent to keep the lights on in South Africa in its 2021/2022 financial year.
Loadshedding forecast: Here’s what we know
CEO Andre de Ruyter led the ‘state of the power system’ update, where it was revealed that slow progress was made in the past few days to, hopefully, lift loadshedding by Friday 22 April 2022.
If all goes according to plan, then loadshedding could be reduced to stage 2 on Thursday evening, De Ruyter noted. The chief executive added that as more power generations units return to the grid, there is low probability of loadshedding next week, but this cannot be set in stone, he warned.
“We don’t anticipate load shedding for next week, however, that depends on how we perform over the weekend and on the rain that has been forecast in the Mpumalanga area – this may have an impact on generation capacity,” he said.
This was the state of the power grid on Thursday morning:
- Planned maintenance: 5 172MW
- Unplanned maintenance: 14 303MW
- Partial load losses: 4 396MW
- Full losses: 9 907MW
How much did Eskom spend on diesel in 2021/2022?
Eskom’s chief financial officer Calib Cassim revealed that diesel is a crucial cog in keeping the lights on in South Africa. With coal-powered generation plants pretty much rotting away, the national electricity provider relies on diesel to fuel gas turbines which, along with megawatts coming from independent power producers (IPPs), afford the country emergency energy supply.
Cassim revealed, on Thursday, that in the 2021/2022 financial year (1 February 2021 – 31 March 2022), Eskom spent an estimated R10 billion on emergency energy. Around R7 billion was spent on diesel, while another R3 billion was forked out to IPPs.
More shockingly, De Ruyter conceded that in April 2022 alone, the power utility has racked up more than R626 million in expenditure on diesel.