The Public Enterprises Minister, Pravin Gordan, has chosen to file an ‘urgent appeal’ to set aside the ruling to comply with a court order to ensure public healthcare facilities, schools and police stations are exempted from loadshedding due to the risk on the nation’s grid.
The Gauteng High Court in Pretoria issued a ruling on Friday, May 5, that mandated a continuous electricity supply for all public hospitals, schools and stations, however, its implementation has drawn criticism from the government and energy analysts due to the difficulty level.
The overwhelming risk posed is that if the government and Eskom were able to adhere to the ruling, the chance of a national blackout would become severely higher and would come with an immense cost to Eskom and tech National Treasury.
The court application was brought forward by 19 unions and political parties, who are seeking to declare loadshedding as unconstitutional and to reduce its detrimental impact on certain critical sectors by exempting these from loadshedding.
The court ruled that where it was not possible to isolate and exempt facilities embedded
in their surroundings networks, Gordan must ensure these facilities get generators and other alternative energy supplies to ensure uninterrupted electricity.
In a statement on Monday, 8 May, Gordan said that his department had serious concerns about the implications of the court ruling on the current efforts to stabilise the national grid and get the country out of loadshedding.
“The department has studied the ruling and has determined through legal advice that the prudent step to take is to lodge an appeal to set aside the ruling and allow for the ongoing efforts to end loadshedding to precede without putting undue risk on the country’s grid infrastructure,” said Gordan.
The department believed that the judgement would have unintended consequences and undermine the efforts to balance the protection of rights with the need to stabilise and protect grid infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the scare of stage 9 and stage 10 loadshedding is underway as electricity consumers are expected to have intensified power cuts for the winter season, since difficulties have forced nearly half of Eskom’s generation capacity to go offline.
Eskom increased loadshedding to stage 6 and kept it there indefinitely due to failures that were approaching their peak at 19 333MW of generating capacity and 4 524MW of planned maintenance that was keeping them out of service.
When there were frequent power outages in February, 21 243MW of breakdowns, 3 566MW were not being maintained.
Lungile Mashele, an independent energy analyst, said that Eskom currently had a deficit of about 6 000MW and the power utility could supply only about 25 000MW against the electricity demand of about 31 000MW.
Mashele said he had anticipated that the country will see stage 7 and stage 8 loadshedding which has been set before, however, the utility will not communicate it as normal and will indicate that it is stage 6 while the number of hours are increased.
“Eskom was forecasting demand of about 34 000MW in the winter months of June to August, which would raise the deficit to a 9 000MW shortfall, which will no doubt take us to stage 9 and 10 loadshedding; which is what I’ve been warning about since the beginning of the year – that if nothing is done, we are going to be in a worse position,” he added.
He further said that Eskom needs to implement the maintenance which was planned for as an urgent intervention and stated that there is a great need for communication from Eskom in terms of what their plan of action will be for winter.
