Eskom GCEO Marokane shares progress after 100 days in office

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Eskom is improving in addressing business challenges and repositioning the utility for growth and sustainability. That’s the view of its Group Chief Executive Dan Marokane, who shared the progress after his first 100 days in office.

He says the first 100 days have been focused on assessing the effectiveness of the Generation Operational Recovery Plan, reviewing the progress on the unbundling of its units and engaging with stakeholders.

Marokane says among the notable progress made in his first 100 days, is the almost 80 days without load shedding. He says the performance comes from aggressive planned maintenance on the back of financial certainty and the use of Original Equipment Manufacturers for critical systems, among other interventions.

Marokane says this improved performance has also seen a reduction in the use of diesel through the Open Cycle Gas Turbines.

“We have a very good base to work on. The executive team here before my arrival together with our staff have already achieved significant progress in the areas of generating recovery. Today, we are on 70 days without load shedding, we have seen some phenomenal performance in as far as the reduction of unplanned outages is concerned. When I last addressed you at the end of April, I did indicate that for us to have a much more comfortable winter, we need to stay below 14 000 mw of unplanned losses. We have averaged around 12 000 mw of unplanned losses that gives us some comfort to deal with the demand when it increases, especially like in the last 10 days with the cold snap coming in,”

The utility remains concerned with the municipal debt levels.

“With the municipalities that are still in arrears, Maluti is one of them, we did sign an active partnering with Maluti, on average annually their bills are close to a billion. And for us, it will make a significant difference in arrear debt and what we are doing is part of the active partnering obviously taking over the operations of Maluti which includes maintaining and operating their network as well as billing and collecting the cash directly to the Eskom bank account,” says Agnes Mlambo, Acting Group Executive: Eskom distribution.

Marokane says over the next 36 months, Eskom will pursue its strategy across several key initiatives to deliver value.

These include increasing the Energy Availability Factor to 70%, returning more than 2.5 gw in capacity to the grid by March 2025 and delivering the unbundling of the distribution and generation divisions.