South Africa crisis eases as power plants fixed

Bloomberg

South Africa’s energy crisis eased as state power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd scrambled to repair broken plants and supplemented supply using gas turbines and pumped-storage facilities.
Power cuts, known locally as load shedding, should be limited to 2,000 megawatts on Wednesday — down from a peak of 6,000 megawatts — and are expected to end next week, Eskom said. The outages temporarily interrupted production at several mines, disrupted mobile-phone services and weighed on the rand.
“As the generating plant continues to perform at low levels of reliability, any unexpected shift, such as an increase in unplanned breakdowns, could result in a change in the load-shedding stage at short notice,” Eskom said. “We continue to ask customers to reduce demand.”
The rand gained for the first day in three, advancing 0.3% to 14.7464 per dollar by 10:10 am in Johannesburg. Eskom, which supplies 95% of the power used in Africa’s most industrialised economy, has struggled to meet demand since 2005, due to its failure to properly maintain aging plants and invest in new ones. The latest round of outages were caused by simultaneous breakdowns at several facilities and were exacerbated by heavy rains that caused flooding and soaked coal stockpiles.
South Africa president Cyril Ramaphosa cut short a trip to Egypt to deal with the crisis, and was briefed by Eskom’s management on Wednesday on what it is doing to address the supply deficit.
“As plausible as some of the explanations that Eskom is putting forward are, it’s really not sufficient,” Ramaphosa’s spokeswoman Khusela Diko said.