Diesel is what a power station fleet burns when it has run out of better options. Eskom keeps open-cycle gas turbines for exactly that, and they have been one of its most expensive tools for holding the grid together when supply falls short. For the financial year to 20 August it spent R992.06 million on diesel, against R5.92 billion over the same stretch last year, a fall of 83.25%.
The turbines are the whole explanation. Their load factor, which is how much of the time they actually run against how much they could, dropped from 8.67% to 1.10%, well inside the 3% Eskom budgets for. Output from them came to 126.47GWh for the year to date, about 87.35% below the same period last year. What did get burnt between 14 and 20 August went into peak demand periods and into holding the reserves the South African grid code requires.
The coal fleet stopped falling over
Breakdowns are down sharply. Average unplanned outages over that week ran at 6 647MW against 10 936MW a year earlier, a drop of 4 289MW or 39.2%. The unplanned capability loss factor, the share of the fleet sitting out of action without warning, improved from 22.90% to 13.82%. Year to date the energy availability factor, the share of the fleet actually able to generate, sits at 67.79% against 60.44% last year, the highest since October 2020.
There is more slack in the system than there was. More than 79% of the coal fleet is running at availability of between 63% and 95%. Planned maintenance has gone up rather than down, averaging 5 731MW or 12.12% of capacity against 11.11% a year ago. Eskom puts the capacity recovered over three years at about 6 100MW, and is holding another 3 967MW in cold reserve because it has more than it needs.
The customers coming off the load reduction schedule
Load reduction is the other programme, and it is the one that still touches people directly. Seven provinces are now clear of it, ahead of an October target, and about 1.2 million customers have gone back to normal supply, roughly 71% of the households the programme set out to reach. That leaves 6.8% of Eskom's customer base still on the schedule, in areas where illegal connections and meter tampering keep damaging infrastructure. The phased plan to end it runs to 2027, covers 971 feeders and about 1.69 million customers out of a base of 7.2 million, and has put 508 510 smart meters in so far, 88% of the 577 347 planned for high-priority areas.
South Africa has gone 462 days without load shedding since 16 May 2025. Eskom's winter outlook, published in April and running to the end of this month, projected none.
