President Cyril Ramaphosa has commended the Energy Action Plan (EAP) which has seen the country having uninterrupted power supply for 48 days.

IT'S WORKING

Ramaphosa has welcomed this stepping. stone and praised his implementation of the EAP as a move in the right direction. "As of today, the country has had no load shedding for over a month and a half. This development shows that the Energy Action Plan we announced in 2022 is working. It is too early to say that load shedding has been brought to an end, however, the sustained improvement in the performance of Eskom's power stations as well as the new generation capacity we have added to our energy system gives us hope that the end of load shedding is in sight," the President said.

BETTER RELIABILITY 

Ramaphosa said paying attention to Eskom's maintenance of infrastructure and servicing units has yielded positive results. "A renewed focus by Eskom on maintenance and the return to service of several units is now showing results. Losses due to unplanned outages have reduced by nine percent between April 2023 and March 2024, adding the equivalent of 4400MW of capacity to our national grid. Better maintained and more reliable power stations have increased the country's Energy Availability Factor, which is the amount of electricity available from our power stations at any given time," he said. Addressing the media yesterday at the Kusile Power station in Mpumalanga on the EAP, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopha said Eskom has achieved an energy availability factor of 70.78% on Monday. Ramokgopa said the milestone was last accomplished in August 2021. "In fact, the picture looks even exceptionally better. I'm happy to say to say to the country, as I stand before today, the energy availability factor of Eskom has breached the 70% mark. So, we are at 70.78 %. That's significant," he said, adding that this kind of achievement has been attained by the competent men and women at the power utility.

Today we are visiting Kusile and Kendal power stations to thank the committed, competent and patriotic men and women of Eskom for their contribution to the significant progress to generation performance. #LeaveNoOneBehind?? pic.twitter.com/tmXMacSzs4

— Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa (@Kgosientsho_R) May 13, 2024