South Africa’s state power utility, Eskom Holdings has released its Winter 2025 Outlook and it assures that its power system is in a further improved and more reliable position than in recent years.
In a statement on social media, Eskom stated that loadshedding is not expected if unplanned outages remain below 13GW.
The company however stated that if outages do increase to 15GW, it would only have to implement Stage 2 loadshedding.
“If outages increase to 15GW, loadshedding would be limited to a maximum of 21 days out of 153 days at Stage 2 — an improvement over the prior winter’s worst-case prediction of Stage 5 loadshedding”.
Eskom attributed the improved winter outlook to a decrease in unplanned outages in 2024.
“This improved winter outlook is due to a 3.1GW decrease in unplanned outages compared to the previous year”.
In 2024, Eskom had gone through most of the year without implementing loadshedding, achieving a streak that lasted more than 300 days.
The winter of 2024 had no loadshedding, with average unplanned outages at 12.3GW, which was significantly below the Winter 2024 base-case projection of 14GW.
Speaking at Eskom’s State of the System Media Briefing in Johannesburg yesterday, Eskom’ Group Chief Executive, Dan Marokane said “This year’s Winter Outlook prediction is built on an improvement in operational performance and overall efficiency.
“Loadshedding was the lowest in Eskom’s last Financial Year (FY) 2025 than in the previous 2 years. In FY 2025 we delivered power 96% of the time, in the previous year the figure was just 9.9%”.
“Our diesel open cycle gas turbines were utilised approximately 50% less in FY2025 compared to the two previous financial years, saving around R16 billion” Marokane said.
Eskom implements loadshedding (power cuts) in order to prevent a total blackout from too much strain on the country’s power generating units
Eskom attributed its improved winter outlook for 2025 to the following factors:
- Fewer unplanned outages which dropped by 4.5GW from 18GW in May 2023 to 13.5GW in April 2025. Also, outages in the summer season averaged 12.5GW.
- Infrastructure maintenance increased to 12.8% (up from 12% last year), improving system reliability.
- Plant availability improved to 61% from 54.6% recorded last year. Diesel use was cut by 50%, saving R16.51 billion ($903.8 million) due to less emergency power needed.
Units 2 & 3 at Kusile Power Station are back online with pollution controls flue gas desulphurisation (FGD system).
The company also stated that Unit 1 will return in June 2025 after maintenance. Meanwhile, Unit 6 was added to the grid in March 2025 with a capacity of 800MW and will be fully operational by September 2025.
