Cape Town - Diesel-fired plants intended for emergencies are now being used on a regular basis, as Eskom continues to operate in crisis mode, already having spent more than half of its annual diesel budget in six months - to the tune of R7 billion.
This was according to Eskom chief operations officer Jan Oberholzer who said the fact that a year’s budget had been spent in six months, was worrying.
“So we have got R350 million left of the original year’s budget and we are only midway through the year. It is a serious concern, so we are going to overspend,” he said.
While diesel is five times the price of coal, the main problem was that Eskom did not have sufficient generating capacity to meet the demand, said energy expert, Professor David Walwyn.
“The demand is about 30GW, generating capacity approaches 50GW, but 40% is not working properly, at times half is not working, so we have a shortfall.
“Eskom generates power from different fuels, most from coal, some nuclear, hydro and diesel.
“These are peaking plants, only used in emergencies, diesel is five times the price of coal as a fuel.
Peaking plants are installed to meet fluctuations in demand on an emergency and rapid response basis.
It’s not supposed to be used routinely, because of the gap in capacity, it is currently being used in routine generation and that’s very very expensive, billions of rand in diesel just to keep the lights on.
“It is not a sustainable solution, only because in crisis mode, they are being told you either keep the lights on or we will take you apart.”
He added that the action plan published by president Cyril Ramaphosa was a “good comprehensive” plan but would take time to implement.
The University of Pretoria’s Professor Heinrich Bohlmann added that the big open gas turbines were using about 14 to 16 litres of diesel a second.
“Big open cycle gas turbines that run on diesel, as has been happening more and more because of unplanned maintenance or breakdowns, are like generators run to add supply to the generation mix but it is a very expensive exercise, we have about 8 of them and they burn about 14 to 16 litres a second.
“We have millions of litres of diesel we have to burn when we have to minimise load shedding, with all the unplanned downtime. We have already exhausted our diesel budget for the year. From a fiscal point of view it is not sustainable. It was only designed to be there in massive peaks in demand, to run for a couple of hours to balance that.
The problem is there were almost permanently emergency breakdowns over the last couple of years.”
He added that with the failures in energy planning going back decades, the power utility had a lot of catching up to do in order to produce the ideal base load of energy supply from its power stations.
Meanwhile, Eskom also confirmed that due to the sudden loss of three Kendal Power Station generating units on Tuesday morning, load shedding was increased to Stage 4 and would be reduced to Stage 2 until midnight on Friday.
Cape Times