Liquidity crunch again held up as key impediment to Eskom’s maintenance roll-out

Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer has once again highlighted the utility’s liquidity crunch as a key constraint to the execution of its much-vaunted reliability maintenance programme, which is seen as key to reversing the poor operational performance of its aged coal fleet. The fleet’s energy availability factor has fallen to 64% year-to-date, resulting in 2021 becoming South Africa’s worst year yet for load-shedding.