State power utility Eskom has spent almost R75 billion on diesel in six years to power its open cycle gas turbines, which have helped prevent load shedding.
Image: RON AI, IOL
Eskom has burned through a massive amount of diesel in order to avoid load shedding in the past year. Recently, the state power utility surpassed more than 300 days without load shedding sponsored power cuts.
Eskom has spent close to R10 billion on diesel since March, helping it keep the lights on.
However, Eskom is implementing wide scale load reduction across the country in areas where it says it finds its infrastructure under pressure to over loading from illegal connections.
In the past six years, Eskom has spent more than R75 billion and counting on diesel to power its Open Cycle Gas Turbines (OCGTs).
OCGTs are power stations that use diesel as their primary resource.
Eskom noted that these are limited fuel sources, and come at a great expense, and therefore the utilisation is tracked very closely.
An analysis of Eskom’s diesel bill in the past six years shows that the power utility has spent R74.48 billion on diesel from 2019 to 2025. Between 2019/20 and 2023/24, Eskom has declared publicly that it spent billions on diesel to help keep the lights on.
The utility has spent:
2019/20 - R5.80 billion
2020/21 - R5.75 billion
2021/22 - R8.60 billion
2022/23 - R21.25 billion
2023/24 - R23.38 billion
2024/25 - R9.87 billion to date (April 2024 to January 2025)
Based on Eskom's data, the utility had to spend R44.63 billion on diesel between 2022 to 2024 thanks to the prolonged days of power cuts.
In 2022 South Africa experienced 205 days of load shedding and in 2023 the country endured a record-breaking 332 days of load shedding.
In 2024, the tide turned and South Africa only had 83 days with load shedding.
On Friday, Eskom said that year-to-date it had spent almost R10 billion on diesel over the last 9 months.
Eskom said that between April 1, 2024, and January 23, 2025, it had spent about R9.87 billion on diesel in the past 9 months.
The power utility has been on a concerted campaign to highlight that it has saved over R16 billion on its diesel costs when compared to the previous financial year.
Matthew Cruise, an energy expert at Forest Energy Solutions claims Eskom has avoided numerous power cuts in January thanks to the use of diesel.
Cruise told Cape Talk that Eskom was not as “stable” as it would like South Africans to believe and there were a few cases where the utility was close to Stage 3 load shedding in January.
“We’ve been 300 days without load shedding. Yes, that is the case, but they’ve been doing everything in their power and spending as much diesel as they can to keep that narrative alive,” he explained.
Cruise said that Eskom fired 2,600MW of diesel on January 9, in order to keep SA out of Stage 3 load shedding.
“They didn’t do the same last year in January when we were dipping in and out of Stages 1, 2, and 3. So, it seems like they’re following a different philosophy when using diesel turbines,” he said.
The energy expert said that Eskom avoided Stage 2 load shedding on January 17, and January 18, by burning diesel.
“I can take a guess that they’re playing to requests of the government to keep the narrative alive,” Cruise said.
Have your say. Are you happy with the billions spent on diesel to keep the lights on?
IOL BUSINESS
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