Kriel Power Station has six 500MW units for a total installed capacity of 3,000MW with a turbine maximum continuous rating of 36.90%. Picture: Eskom
South Africa’s energy crisis seems to be a thing of the past as the state-power utility, Eskom, said that Sunday marked 10 months of being load shedding-free.
Eskom said in a statement, “A further substantial milestone of 300 days without load shedding was reached on Tuesday, 21 January and 10 months without load shedding achieved on Sunday 26 January, further demonstrating the progress in Eskom’s turnaround strategy.”
Eskom said the power generation was due to its focused execution of the Generation Recovery Plan.
“Year-to-date diesel savings (on a year-on-year basis) are currently at R16.40 billion, which is about 62.4% less than the R26.27 billion spent during the same period last year. Last August, Eskom shared its summer outlook for the period from 1 September 2024 to 31 March 2025, predicting a likely scenario of a loadshedding-free summer due to structural generation improvements. This outlook remains unchanged,” Eskom further stated.
Industry leaders and government officials who attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) last week, used Eskom’s turn around as a key tool to attract investors to the country.
Adrian Gore, the CEO of Discovery, said in a LinkedIn post on Friday that he had a fascinating few days at the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos and shared a few things that stood out to him.
“The first is the transformation in sentiment around South Africa, both from within the country and from the global business and investment community. Ending loadshedding and the partnership between business and the government has created a completely different dynamic, which we need to capitalise on. South Africa’s leadership of the B20 and G20 will also play a key role in this,” he said.
“We are living in very interesting, complex, and exciting times,” Gore said.
While load shedding remained suspended, Eskom further said it is dealing with network overloading issues in certain areas due to illegal connections, vandalism, meter tampering, unauthorised network operations, theft of network equipment, and purchasing electricity from unlicensed vendors.
The energy provider made the below appeal to South Africans:
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