Ramokgopa: Winter will be tough for Eskom
Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa says while the government is doing everything it can to alleviate load shedding over the short term - the next 150 days won't be easy for anyone.
Ramakgopa gave an update government's efforts to end the energy crisis on Friday.
He says the winter months will be difficult due to the sheer number of generating units that need to be taken offline for repairs.
"We need to acknowledge the power system is under severe strain. You can see how we are oscillating between stage 4 and stage 6. These are stages of load shedding that undermine the growth of the South African economy.
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"Load shedding by definition does that, but I think it gets to be accentuated when you get these levels of load shedding and that is because, in our planned outage, they are sitting at about 3 828 megawatts and unplanned outage this is a result of the trips that happen at the various units at Eskom is at upwards of 16 000 megawatts."
Ramokgopa says there is some good news at Kusile.
"I must say that we are also making progress in relation to cleaning the three units at Kusile, as you know the timelines at Eskom shared with us is that those three units that were discontinued as a result of the compromised structural integrity of the chimney at Kusile those units should be back by December this year and that's 2 100 megawatts."
