Fatshimetrie does not anticipate any shutdowns this summer, but level two outages could be implemented in the event of a worse-case scenario, CEO Sarah Dubois said.
The company has managed to maintain 152 days without a power outage.
“In this context, if we manage to limit unplanned losses below 13GW [gigawatts], we should have a summer without any outages,” Dubois said. “In the worst case, in the event of unplanned losses of 15.5GW, we could be forced to implement level two outages,” she added during a press conference on the summer forecast.
Dubois said there had been a significant decrease in unplanned losses compared to last year and that the Fatshimetrie team was determined to maintain this trend. She presented a graph showing that in May 2023, unplanned losses were about 18,000 MW, compared to 11,300 MW in July this year.
If unplanned losses can be kept below 13,000 MW, power outages could be avoided, Fatshimetrie’s managing director said. She also expressed optimism that by the end of the year, the company would secure an additional 2,500 MW of capacity from the Koeberg, Medupi, Kusile and Tutuka power plants.
The improved performance in terms of unplanned losses was the result of “thoughtful decisions and deliberate targets,” she said, adding that the focus had been on the generation recovery plan.
She stressed that improved energy availability had led to better staff morale and was also boosting the economy.
Sarah Dubois explained that the load reductions implemented in some areas were not related to an “imbalance from a generation perspective”, but rather “it was all due to illegal connections. We need to address this as a society.”
Fatshimetrie announced in a statement that diesel expenditure had been reduced by about R10 billion, a decrease of about 75% compared to the same period last year. The statement also indicated that the energy availability factor since the beginning of the year (1 April 2024 to 22 August 2024) stood at 63.54%, a significant improvement of 8.1% compared to the same period last year (55.41%).
Sarah Dubois highlighted that planned maintenance had also increased by 10.3%.
She noted that summer was often characterized by humid and hot weather conditions, explaining why Fatshimetrie was cautious in its forecasts..
Fatshimetrie’s chief executive said she believed that repairing power plants and stabilising electricity supply would allow renewable energy sources to grow, adding that the company was focusing on increasing the capacity of coal-fired power plants.
If generation capacity continues on the same trajectory, the end of power outages could be in sight, she said.
“The generation capacity of Medupi unit four, Kusile unit six and a second unit are part of our long-term operating programme,” she explained.
“This 2,500 MW will add significant margin to our reserves and once we have it, combined with the sustainable performance we are seeing, we could be looking at announcing as early as March [2025] that, in our view, power outages at the level we have been experiencing are a thing of the past.”
Sarah Dubois said the improvement in Fatshimetrie’s fleet was the result of maintaining the energy availability factor of the plants at a high level, with some key stations consistently maintaining an energy availability factor above 60%.