First-ever Christmas load-shedding on the cards for South Africa

South Africans should brace themselves for their first Christmas with load-shedding in 2022.

For all the years that rotational power cuts have frustrated the country, Eskom has avoided load-shedding over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

The same goes for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day — except at the end of 2020, when stage 2 load-shedding was briefly in effect from 00:00 to 05:00 on 31 December.

The historically lower likelihood of load-shedding over the festive season is because Eskom’s most energy-heavy customers — factories, mines, and smelters — shut down operations.

Last year, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter could effectively guarantee no load-shedding over Christmas and New Year during the utility’s interim results presentation on 15 December 2021.

“Typically, demand for electricity is much lower over the festive season. After the 16th [of December], when the builders’ holiday starts, demand drops down as well,” De Ruyter explained.

Eskom was so confident that it put two generating units on cold reserve at the time.

“What that means is that we have excess generation capacity, which is a very unusual position for Eskom to find itself in,” De Ruyter said.

Fast forward to Eskom’s latest quarterly State of the System update on 15 November 2022, and the situation has changed radically.

Eskom unable to provide definitive outlook

In a statement published in mid-November, Eskom said prolonged load-shedding would continue to be implemented over the “next few months” as the utility takes a large amount of generation offline.

“Due to the vulnerability and unpredictability of the power system, coupled with the major capital projects, maintenance and major repairs to be executed starting during the next few months, the risk of continued load-shedding remains quite high,” said Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer.

When MyBroadband asked the utility whether this forecast applied to this year’s holiday period, Eskom would only refer us back to the statement.

“Regarding any load-shedding outlook for the next 6-12 months — including the period you have mentioned — kindly refer to the statement Eskom published on 15 November 2022,” Eskom said.

MyBroadband followed up and asked whether the utility could not be more specific regarding the outlook for the two weeks, which include Christmas and New Year’s, as it had been able to in the past.

But Eskom did not reply again.

Based on its feedback, one can only conclude that Eskom does not know whether it will be able to supply enough power to the country over the festive season.

The table below provides an overview of each year’s first and last days on which load-shedding was implemented.

The fact that Eskom cannot guarantee no load-shedding during a period that historically has the lowest demand is another indication of how severe its generation challenges have become.

Comparing Eskom’s latest system status report with one from the same time last year shows further evidence that load-shedding is possible over Christmas and New Year’s.

That is unless Eskom makes some drastic changes to its maintenance programme.

Last year, Eskom’s outlook showed it had adequate generation to supply the country under its “planned” risk level with breakdowns at 14,200MW and its “likely” scenario with 16,200MW of breakdowns for the two weeks from 20 December 2021 to 2 January 2022.

This year, the outlook shows that Christmas week (19-25 December 2022) will see Eskom face a shortage of over 1,000MW (stage 1) in generating capacity under its planned risk level of 15,200MW in breakdowns.

That increases to a shortage of over 2,001MW (stage 2) in the likely risk scenario with outages at around 16,700MW.

During the New Year’s week (26 December 2022 to 1 January 2023), Eskom anticipates a shortage of less than 1,000MW under the same planned risk scenario, or over 2,001MW for the likely risk scenario.

While Eskom is anticipating very similar levels of contracted and residual demand, its outlook shows available capacities are substantially lower this year, while planned maintenance outages are much higher.

Eskom had forecasted having between 30,192MW and 31,567 MW of capacity during the 2021/2022 festive period, while planned maintenance for the two weeks stood at 5,198MW and 3,823MW, respectively.

For the 2022/2023 festive period, it is anticipating only between 23,185MW and 25,035MW capacity to be available, and planned maintenance of 8,956MW and 10,806MW.

If all goes according to Eskom’s plan, the latter will be the highest amount of maintenance conducted for any two weeks of the coming year, by some margin.

The tables below compare Eskom’s 52-week system status outlooks as of week 46 of 2021 and 2022 — with the two festive season weeks highlighted in purple rectangles.

2021

2022

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