By Umamah Bakharia

If Eskom runs out of diesel at its gas turbines, a further three stages will be added to the load-shedding schedule this is according to Eskom’s chief operating officer, Jan Oberholzer.

He says stage four load-shedding was implemented so that Eskom’s diesel supplies would not be depleted. The gas turbines currently use 14 litres of diesel a second.

“In order to protect and ensure the integrity of the electrical system, proactive implementation of load-shedding is required,” says Oberholzer.

He adds: “We all agree that it is unsustainable and we need to get out of this situation. But for us, burning diesel and having a financial blood nose is better than putting the country into a higher stage of load-shedding.”

Radio Islam speaks to energy expert Andre Kenny on South Africa’s loadshedding problem to discuss further.

“The stations keep failing,” says Kenny, he adds that the use of diesel is very expensive to keep the stations running.

In response to inflated oil prices due to the Russia-Ukraine war, Oberholzer says Eskom is evaluating the effect of the war on South Africa’s energy supply. He also clarified that it currently costs R4 700 for one megawatt of electricity generated by the diesel-powered turbines.

Eskom CEO, Andre de Ruyter is currently having talks with the World Bank in Washington, USA, asking for assistance to help South Africa move to a move sustainable energy solution.

“We should be moving away from coal but in the meantime, we need to get the coal stations going because we got nothing else,” says Kenny.

He questions what de Ruyter wants to move from coal as the best possible solution would be to transfer to nuclear energy.

“He [de Ruyter] speaks about using renewable [energy] which is a bad thing, what he should be doing is asking for nuclear, but the problem with nuclear is, it’s going to take a long time to come on stream,” says Kenny.

He suggests that Eskom make use of imported gas to sustain the country short time.