Two units at Tutuka will be back online in September- Ramokgopa

Ramokgopa says the return of these units will add 2 500 MW to the national grid, leading to a relief of at least two stages of load shedding.

Ramokgopa briefed the media on Sunday on the implementation of the Energy Action Plan.

The Tutuka Power Station has been labeled as the worst-performing of the Eskom stations, contributing massively to the country's electricity crisis.

The station has also reported several cases of fraud, theft, and sabotage.

"Tutuka has been a perennial underperformer in recent years, historically its Energy Availability Factor (EAF) has moved from 98% to 21%.

“This is a big power station in that you have six installed units that should be generating about 3 500 MW but all we are getting is 21% of that.

“And that's why we have deployed additional resources in the context of the resource mobilization fund, they are stationed at Tutuka.

“I visited Tutuka on Friday to get a sense from management as to where they are, of course, there is a plan to return a number of units into service and we said that plan has to be robust because on three or four occasions they had plans to return units and we did not succeed and this speaks to the number of outages," said Ramokgopa.

He says the two units could be back online before the end of September.

"We do expect that towards the end of September, we should have the two of these units back and the conversation was more robust there. We are confident that we will be seeing these units coming back online in early September and others later September."

At the same time, Eskom announced the return of stage 3 load shedding between 4 pm and 5 am and stage 1 between 5 am and 4 pm until further notice.

"This pattern will be implemented daily until further notice. Eskom will publish another update should any significant changes occur," said Eskom.