* Planned maintenance, unplanned outages hit supply
* Some 12 pct of supply of 41,000 MW out for maintenance
JOHANNESBURG Jan 10 (Reuters) – South African utility
Eskom warned this week that supply of electricity will
be extremely tight in January after the power firm took down
more plants to conduct maintenance and supply had also been hit
by unplanned outages.
The national grid nearly collapsed in early 2008, forcing
mines and smelters to shut for days and costing Africa’s biggest
economy billions of dollars in lost output.
While there were no planned blackouts for now, Eskom has
asked consumers, especially energy-intensive industrial users,
to reduce demand to ease the strain on the power system.
“It’s a challenging week and it will probably be a
challenging month,” spokeswoman Hilary Joffe said.
She said that some 12 percent of South Africa’s total supply
of around 41,000 megawatts (MW) were down for planned
maintenance.
“We want to catch up on the backlog and not defer any
scheduled maintenance,” she said.
On top of that, supply had also been hit by unplanned
outages and underperforming plants, she added.
Continued…
