Eskom’s Loadshedding Persists as Govt Admits 40% Due to ‘Human Error’

The Department of Public Enterprises said Wednesday that South Africa’s power utility Eskom is struggling to keep its mainly coal-fired plants running due to coal shortages and poor maintenance, with 40 percent of breakdowns a result of human error.

The department, which oversees Eskom, also said in a presentation to parliament that Eskom was technically insolvent and would “cease to exist” at the current trajectory by April, unless it gets a cash injection.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said last week that the government would support Eskom’s balance sheet but that the scale of that support would be revealed only in a budget speech by the finance minister on Feb. 20.

Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan said detailed mistakes that had been made at Eskom and said that they have called on ENEL, one of the world’s leading energy suppliers, to provide the power utility with external technical assistance.

Gordhan also said today that South Africa is not planning to privatise Eskom after the firm is split into three separate entities of generation, transmission and distribution.

“At no stage has the president said, or the government indicated, that there would be privatisation of any of these entities or that this is the motivation for the separation into three entities,” Gordhan told a parliamentary committee.

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the plan to split Eskom into three entities last week, in an effort to make the company more efficient.

Fourth day of load shedding in South Africa

Eskom implemented electricity cuts  (aka the dreaded loadshedding!) for a fourth straight day on Wednesday, as the struggling state-owned firm battles a shortage of capacity that threatens to derail government plans to lift the sluggish economy.

The power cuts are expected to last until 23h00 tonight.

Around a third of Eskom’s 45,000 MW capacity was offline on Tuesday.

Ramaphosa has said the latest power cuts are “most worrying”.

(Reporting by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and Wendell Roelf; Editing by Kirsten Donovan,  Subhranshu Sahu and Jenni Baxter)