Eskom to resume load shedding
South Africa’s state-owned power utility Eskom will resume load shedding on Monday evening, from 21h00, following breakdowns at some of its electricity-generating plants over the weekend.
Eskom has been cutting 2,000 megawatts from the grid since Saturday evening after breakdowns and malfunctions at six of its plants. The rolling power cuts were suspended early on Monday morning, however, they will resume from 21h00 – 05h00 on Monday and Tuesday evening.
Eskom attributed this issue to a trip at Koeburg Unit 1 as a result of a fault on a feedwater pump that is on the secondary plant. It emphasized that there are no nuclear safety concerns on the reactor side of the plant, and it is, therefore, ready to be restarted once the pump fault has been resolved.
“We anticipate the need to utilise emergency reserves extensively during the next few days to avoid load-shedding,” Eskom said in a statement. “To achieve this, Stage 2 load shedding will be required during Monday and Tuesday nights to replenish the emergency reserves for the following day.”
The state company said that total breakdowns currently amount to 15,813MW, while planned maintenance is 4,967 of capacity. “Eskom would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused by the implementation of load shedding, and requests the public to reduce the usage of electricity in order to help us through the constraints,” it said.
Stage 2 loadshedding will be suspended at 05:00 on Monday; then resume at 21:00 – 05: 00 on Monday and Tuesday nights pic.twitter.com/DJSMkJXmN8
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) October 24, 2021
The nation is heading for a record year of blackouts this year, with data from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research showing that outages in the first half were equivalent to about 70% of those experienced throughout 2020, Bloomberg reported.
For people living in the major metros, load shedding schedules are available here:
- City of Johannesburg
- City of Ekurhuleni
- City of Tshwane
- City of Cape Town (PDF)
- Nelson Mandela Bay
- eThekwini
- Manguang
- Buffalo City
For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.
Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.