Eskom’s aggressive maintenance plan leaves little headroom: Ramokgopa

Electricity Minister Dr. Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says the generation recovery plan although it is aggressive, it’s the right call to make as progress has been seen.

This comes as Eskom has implemented Stage 6 loadshedding following 10 units failing at three power stations.

These setbacks are coupled with the generation recovery plan that saw Eskom take 7 500 megawatts of generation power offline for the purposes of maintenance.

Ramokgopa says the generation capacity that they had was sufficient to meet the demand but they couldn’t anticipate the tripping of so many units.

“I’ll prefer to say the headroom that we have created as result of being a bit more aggressive on maintenance did not give us the opportunity to maneuver in the event we have a cluster of units failing. What is the option of going this route, there’s a downside of taking the route we are taking and that downside is that once you have a cluster of units failing, you don’t have sufficient headroom for you to accommodate or absorb those failures and the only tools at your disposal is loadshedding and that risk has materialised now.”