JOHANNESBURG - Eskom says it is moving further away from rolling blackouts after adding 4,400 megawatts to the grid to ensure stability.
The power utility said the added generation capacity, which has been bolstered by the return of three big units, was part of its recovery plan to recover close to 6,000 megawatts.
Eskom generation manager Eric Shunmagum said the system was stable and ready to meet demand.
“We've had the Kusile 6 that came back, you had the Medupi 4 and then one of the units at Koeberg that was on a long-term outage came back,” said Shunmagum.
In terms of new capacity coming in, he said the power utility’s planned maintenance now also complies with international norms.
“From a system reliability point of view, we have more confidence because we’ve got that capacity available. The additional capacity puts us in a very favourable position”
He said the big focus now would be to eliminate load reduction. Eskom has identified 971 feeders that contribute to its load reduction.
“In the next two years, with the rollout of the programme, we’ll see close to 1.69 million people benefit from it. The test is going to be in the coming months as we report progress for this project. There is huge capacity planned for the coming years."