Following their last-minute rescheduling on Monday, Eskom announced on Tuesday that Stage 2 loadshedding will be continuing all week until 5am on Saturday.
“While Eskom teams have successfully returned a unit each at the Kusile, Matimba and Arnot power stations during the early hours of this (Tuesday) morning, further delays in returning other units to service have exacerbated the capacity constraints, hampering the ability to replenish the emergency generation reserves,” Eskom said in a recent statement.
“Eskom anticipates to return Koeberg Unit 1 to service during the weekend. Eskom also expects to return five other units to service during the week.
“However, there are a number of generation units running with risk of failure that cannot be attended to at the moment due to the current capacity constraints.”
The power utility urged members of the public to reduce electricity usage where possible to help limit strain on the national grid.
Stage 2 loadshedding first came into effect on Saturday October 23 as previously reported by The Herald: “The power utility said the planned outage is due to a shortage of generation capacity caused by breakdowns, numerous trips at various power stations, as well as delays in returning units to service” (‘Eskom to implement stage 2 load-shedding on Saturday night’, October 23).
They had to bring their loadshedding schedule forward by three hours on Monday due to trips at Unit 1 of Kusile and Matimba Unit 5 which took 1,300MW of capacity off the grid.
UPDATE
Eskom announced on Wednesday morning that it will be moving to Stage 4 until Friday due to “further shortage of generation capacity”.
Regretfully Stage 4 loadshedding will be implemented from 12:00 on Wednesday until 05:00 on Friday; thereafter Stage 2 loadshedding will continue as previously communicated until 05:00 on Saturday pic.twitter.com/H7CR4bk0A0
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) October 27, 2021
