The last three weeks of load shedding suspensions during the day have significantly impacted SA’s load shedding trendline, which is slowly starting to reflect more positive longer-term trend data.

That’s according to the latest Power Availability Statistics for the 25th week of the year, compiled by independent energy analyst, Pieter Jordaan.

While South Africans more commonly use total hours of load shedding to gauge how bad outages are in the country, Jordaan’s data looks at more impactful points like blackout hours (i.e. actual time spent in the dark) and the Power Availability Ratio (PAR) of the grid.

BusinessTech reports that PAR represents the time consumers have utility power available after deducting the load shedding outage times, expressed as a percentage.

At 100%, households have full access to grid power. Every 7% below that point represents a full stage of load shedding where power is taken away.

Tracking PAR over a moving seven days (PAR-7), the ratio climbed 19 percentage points to 91% two weeks ago when power utility Eskom had managed to consistently suspend load shedding for most of the day.

This represented the fastest weekly recovery rate ever, Jordaan said – with the improvement markedly better than that seen in late March, early April when the Easter break allowed for lower stages of load shedding to take place. 

Cooler weather, lower demand, and improved generation (EAF of 59%) has helped Eskom keep effective load shedding at around stage 1 for the past three weeks, Jordaan said, adding that lower levels of cartel criminality at the coal-fired plants may also have contributed to the sustained improvement.

Full BusinessTech report