Enigin Update - Utility Warn of Outages
SOUTH African power utility company Eskom placed the country on an electricity alert last week, they say they will work to prevent load-shedding but they also need businesses to do their part.
At a briefing, Eskom’s chief executive, Brian Dames, said that heavy rains combined with an unplanned shutdown at the Koeburg nuclear power plant and uncertainty over the scale of future electricity demand poses a risk to the security of the power supply.
The power company said that if energy savings cannot be made then a mandatory energy conservation scheme targeting its 500 largest customers will have to be implemented. The country has not resorted to load-shedding since April 2008.
Eskom warned that “unless steps were taken to address it”, a 6TWh gap could be seen over the financial year 2011-12, followed by 9TWh in 2012-13 financial period.
A key issue is the amount of reserve capacity, as Dames explained:
“The bottom line is the system is tight, we don’t have adequate reserves. The pressure going forward is about having enough reserves.”
Enigin Distributors across the Cape have the cutting edge energy saving technology from Enigin that enable business owners to intelligently control their energy use.
With Eniscope Real-time and Analytics from Enigin, energy use can be monitored as it is used. Armed with this data and the historical analysis of energy consumption, decision makers are able to save energy and money while maintaining production or services.
Current demand for electricity in South Africa is around 29GW and is expected to rise to 30GW this week, while Eskom’s full capacity is 43GW (including importing energy for Mozambique). During the same period last year the country saw forced outages take out 3500MW from operations, while planned maintenance accounted for another 6500MW.
Picture by NJR ZA
