The country has had 100 days of no load shedding, Eskom said on Friday . The breakthrough is the result of a recovery plan initiated in March 2023 and "aggressive" maintenance of the company's power plants, it said.
Eskom's failure to maintain its ageing fleet of generating facilities, coupled with mismanagement and corruption, rendered the company incapable of meeting electricity demand and resulting in record outages last year. That slowed output at South African businesses and led to the slowest rate of expansion since the pandemic in 2020, when the economy grew 0.7%.
"The absence of load shedding not only benefits our economy and businesses but also enhances the quality of the lives of our citizens," energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said in a statement. The last time Eskom was able to deliver uninterrupted power supply for that length of time occurred between September and December 2020.
Eskom, heavily indebted and facing declining revenue, has tried for years to increase repairs to coal-fired power plants that make up the backbone of its generation fleet. It received a R254-billion bailout in 2023 that's being given to the utility in tranches, subject to it meeting performance criteria set by national treasury. The transfers were reduced in February.
So accustomed have South Africans become to regular outages that when Eskom initially began reducing the power cuts, they were suspected to be an election ploy. Critics accused the utility of relying on generation from diesel-fuelled auxiliary turbines that Eskom has spent billions of rand a year on running them.
