As South Africa’s primary electricity supplier, Eskom’s mandate is to ensure security of supply to service the South African economy and society.
Eskom therefore generates, transports and distributes electricity – and this is managed predominantly by Eskom for the entire country; however, Eskom only directly supplies more than 6 million households which means that most of us are supplied by municipalities.
At all times there must be sufficient supply to meet demand, however electricity demand is not constant because of:
- peak periods when demand is higher
- and continuous growth in the number of customers requiring electricity services.
This means that the power system requires constant and prudent management of supply to meet demand but, today, Eskom faces the challenge of a constrained power system that will affect us until substantial new power capacity is available. In the meantime, to meet demand, our older power stations and infrastructure are being used to full capacity. In addition, routine and necessary maintenance of plant and infrastructure is carefully scheduled to limit compromising supply capacity during periods of high demand. We have also strengthened the distribution network to reduce the incidence of localised outages when the power trips because of overload in local areas such as suburbs.
Localised outages should not be confused with load shedding. Local outages can occur when there is either a technical fault in the transmission or distribution network. Outages can also occur when electricity equipment has been tampered with due to theft of cables or when there is an overload of the local system because of irregular high usage, caused by electricity theft or normal faults.
Load shedding is a controlled process that responds to unplanned events in order to protect the electricity power system from a total blackout. While we generally use the word blackout loosely to mean “no lights” in our local area, a country-wide blackout has much more serious consequences. Blackouts occur when there is too much electricity demand and too little supply, bringing the power system into an imbalance and consequently tripping the power system in its entirety.
Many countries and cities in other parts of the world have experienced complete blackouts. To re-start their system, these countries have been able to tap into a power system from neighbouring city or country, which can take up to a few hours or days. Unfortunately in South Africa, we have to rely on ourselves to start the system from scratch – energising one power plant at a time and one section of the country at a time. In the event of a Blackout in South Africa, it could take up to two weeks to restore full power, which would have a severe impact on our country! This is why we use load shedding to manage our power system and protect it from such an event.
Eskom’s Load Shedding Protocols
Keeping the power system balanced is critical to prevent a nation-wide blackout, and so when the national electricity grid is under pressure, Eskom must reduce demand, as agreed with the National Energy Regulator (NERSA), and therefore implements a process of Load Reduction.
load Reduction has two components:
- Load Curtailment. Our agreement with some of our large industrial customers means we can instruct them to reduce electricity consumption in order to balance the system. Some customers are able to reduce their load by up to 20%, significantly easing capacity on the grid; but it takes a minimum of 2 hours to implement.
- Load Shedding. If, after Load Curtailment, the demand on the system is still greater than available supply, we have to implement a process of load shedding in order to prevent an imbalance and subsequent blackout. Load shedding will also be implemented if there is insufficient time to request load curtailment.