Eskom says it plans to continue implementing the appropriate levels of planned maintenance to ensure long-term plant reliability.

“Eskom has not implemented load shedding for the past nine months and our plan is to continue implementing appropriate levels of planned maintenance to ensure long-term plant reliability,” it said on Tuesday.

In a statement following a two-day board of directors’ session, Eskom said the reduction in unplanned outages contributed to improvements of plant availability and the sharp reduction in the usage of open cycle gas turbines (OCGTs).

OCGT (diesel) usage declined by 53% between October 2015 and December 2015.

Eskom has decreased the usage of diesel from R800 million to R40 million in five months due to improved performance of its base-load fleet.

The utility will continue with its rigorous planned maintenance without implementing load shedding while also minimising usage of the OCGTs.

Generation Sustainability Strategy

With regards to the Generation Sustainability Strategy, the utility aims to achieve 80% plant availability, 10% planned maintenance and 10% unplanned maintenance over the medium term.

The adherence to regular scheduled maintenance is managed through the Tetris planning tool, which schedules outages based on forecasted demand and maintenance requirements.

“A key aspect of this includes having a strict winter and summer maintenance budget that comprises 8.5GW for winter and 11.5GW for summer,” said Eskom.

New generating capacity

While working on the performance of the existing ageing fleet, Eskom has also fast tracked the building of new generating capacity.

On 6 March this year, Unit 3 of the Ingula Pumped Storage Scheme was synchronised to the national power grid, marking a key milestone towards the full commercial operation of the unit ahead of the scheduled deadline of January 2017.

Unit 3 is the first of the four units of the Ingula Pumped Storage Scheme to be connected to the national grid. Once completed, all four units of Ingula will produce a total of 1 332 MW.

This, said Eskom, will go a long way to meeting the country’s rising electricity demand.

“Once completed in the next five years, our capacity expansion programme, which is the largest in the company’s history, will increase our generation capacity by 17 384MW, transmission lines by 9 756km and substation capacity by 42 470MVA.