Eskom’s diesel bill has dropped by 86% this financial year as breakdowns hit an eight-year low, marking a significant shift in the utility’s operational performance.
The state power utility recorded a daily energy availability factor of 80.24% on 20 July, its best single day since September 2017. The financial year-to-date figure stands at 66.22%, an improvement of 6.97 percentage points year on year, though it remains below the 70% recovery benchmark Eskom has set.
Planned maintenance timing drives much of this performance. Eskom reduces this maintenance during peak winter demand periods. The planned capacity loss factor for the week to 23 July was 7.19%, down from 10.74% a year earlier. However, fewer units in for repair means more are available to dispatch, which skews the daily reading upward.
The substantive improvement is visible in unplanned outages. On 19 July, unplanned outages dropped to 5.89GW, the lowest daily level since July 2018. Across the week, they averaged 7.07GW against 11.84GW a year earlier.
The unplanned capacity loss factor improved to 14.94% from 24.66%. Eskom put this year-on-year improvement at 4.25GW, or 35.9%. However, cross-checking the figures suggests the utility’s reported reduction is the outlier. Eskom’s own averages imply a reduction of 4.77GW, or 40.3%. This discrepancy is the only time in the three-week period reviewed where the utility’s arithmetic did not subtract correctly.
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Reducing unplanned outages directly impacts the utility’s finances. Eskom has spent R807.4-million on diesel in the financial year to date, down from R5.62-billion over the same period last year, an 85.6% reduction. Between 17 and 23 July, it burnt no diesel at all.
Its diesel-fired open-cycle gas turbines have run at a load factor of 1.14% for the year to date, against 10.28% last year and well within the budgeted 3%.
Load shedding ends for winter
Eskom counted 434 consecutive days without load shedding as at 23 July, dating back to 16 May 2025. The utility says demand has been met 100% of the time this financial year. Its winter outlook, published in April, projects no load shedding through to 31 August.
Load reduction, which involves localised cuts in areas with illegal connections and meter tampering, is receding on a slower curve. Six provinces are now clear and about 1.2 million customers have come off the schedules, or about 70% of the 1.7 million targeted, following the one million milestone earlier this month. A seventh province is due to be cleared by October, with nationwide eradication targeted for 2027.
