South Africans will have the lights on through winter and summer this year, according to Eskom.

The national utility’s CEO, Brian Molefe, has announced that there hasn’t been any loadshedding for the last nine months and this state of affairs will continue for the remainder of this year.

“We haven’t had loadshedding for nine months since August 2015, average planned maintenance has been 12.5% since August 2015…Eskom’s prognosis for 2016/17, is that there will be no loadshedding,” he said.

“There will be no loadshedding now in winter…and there will be no loadshedding during summer as well. And as the president said, there will never be loadshedding” Molefe said, referring to President Jacob Zuma’s declaration on Monday during his visit to the Eskom headquarters.

Molefe added that Eskom’s energy availability has increased from 70% in October last year to 76% in April this year and 80% by this morning.

“This is largely due to a decrease in [power station] breakdowns which is attributable to the success of our maintenance programme and we’ve been able to add additional capacity from just making more machines available,” he added.

Molefe also highlighted that 3 000MW added capacity need last year to deal with loadshedding came through the switching on of the Medupi power station, which added 3279MW onto the national grid.

[Image – CC Public Domain]