JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa's state power utility Eskom said on Friday that it would probably be able to limit rolling power cuts over the winter months as the outlook for its fleet of power stations had improved.
Eskom has battled to keep the lights on for more than a decade in Africa's most industrialised economy, but things got particularly bad last year when outages reached record levels of roughly 10 hours a day for many businesses and households.
The reasons include a maintenance backlog at its creaking coal-fired power stations, years of corruption and smaller-than-requested tariff hikes that have left it with a mountain of debt.
Eskom Chief Executive Dan Marokane, addressing his first news conference since taking the helm of the company in March, said there had been an improvement in power plant reliability, with unplanned losses and trips declining thanks to "a culmination of interventions that started a year ago".
A likely scenario was Eskom would only resort to "Stage 2" outages during the southern hemisphere winter months, roughly April to August, he said.
Stage 2 power cuts require up to 2,000 megawatts of capacity to be shed from the national grid, whereas last year Eskom frequently had to resort to Stage 6 power cuts - the highest level.
The recurring outages are a major drag on economic growth and a source of public frustration in the lead-up to a general election in May, when analysts say the governing African National Congress party's parliamentary majority is at risk for the first time since the end of apartheid.
Marokane told reporters that under Eskom's base case there would be 50 days of power cuts from April to August and that Eskom would spend about 8.8 billion rand ($466.84 million) on diesel for its open-cycle gas turbines.
($1 = 18.8502 rand)
(Reporting by Kopano Gumbi and Joe Bavier; Writing by Anait Miridzhanian; Editing by Alexander Winning and Louise Heavens)
By Kopano Gumbi and Joe Bavier
