Eskom intensified its plant maintenance and fast-tracked the recovery of stock levels from December 13 to January 13, when there was a low demand for electricity.
But Eskom’s energy availability factor for the year declined by 6.9% from 78.8% in 2017 to 71.9% in 2018, according to energy expert Chris Yelland. For the last week of December it reached a new low of 63%. The energy availability factor refers to the availability of Eskom’s plant fleet once they have taken into consideration planned maintenance and unplanned breakdowns.
Planned maintenance outages amounted to 15% of the outages in the third week of December and 18.4% in the last week, said Yelland.
Unplanned breakdown outages amounted to 19.5% and 17.5% of the fleet respectively.
Yelland said the high level of planned maintenance outages was expected because demand is low over the holiday period, allowing Eskom to do additional maintenance.
But, he said: “The leve
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