Stage 3 load shedding hits South Africa

Eskom will implement stage 3 load shedding in South Africa, with the state-owned facing challenges at its nuclear and coal-fired power stations.

Load shedding will be active from 14h00 today, 7 March, to 05h00 on Monday, 10 March.

With reserves at Steenbras, Cape Town customers will see load shedding reduced to stage 1 during certain parts of Friday and Saturday.

The latest round of rotating power cuts marks another setback for Eskom, following nearly a year of no load shedding.

Eskom said that the implementation is due to a loss of 2,700MW over the last 14 hours. To replenish emergency reserves over the weekend, high levels of planned maintenance will also continue.

The lost capacity comes from Koeberg Unit 2, which was taken offline after being brought back on Wednesday.

The group added that two Kusile Units were also affected as their coal operations went sub-optimal following adverse weather in the area.

“Higher levels of planned maintenance outages, aimed at winter preparation and meeting regulatory and environmental licensing requirements, are still underway,” said Eskom.

“The constrained capacity resulted in the increased reliance on emergency reserves during this week, which makes it necessary to focus on replenishing these critical resources during the weekend in preparation for the business week.

“Eskom is focused on deploying extra engineering resources to expedite the repair of units currently offline.”

The utility expects that 6,200MW will be restored to service by Monday’s evening peak. It stressed that the events that triggered stage 3 load shedding occurred while the system was already under strain.

Plans remain the same

Eskom said that its Summer Outlook, which was published on 26 August 2024, remains unchanged.

“We reiterate our commitment to ensuring that South Africa is in no way returning to the levels of load shedding that we experienced in 2023,” said Eskom’s Group Executive Generation, Bheki Nxumalo.

“Two years into delivering the generation recovery plan that will bring an end load shedding, we are at a challenging time, and the full force of our highly skilled engineering resources are deployed and focussed.”

“We have had some delays in returning units that previously tripped back to the grid, as well as to the return of three units that have been on longer-term outage that will bring back 2500MW to the grid, which will happen over the coming week.”

Eskom Group Chief Executive Dan Marokane added that “load shedding is a painful reminder of the past, and situations such as this drive our resolve to double down and stay the course to end load shedding.”

Marokane apologised to South Africans for the temporary setback but said that the SOE needs to keep its focus on intensive maintenance, which led to a suspension of load shedding for roughly 300 days.

“We maintain our guidance that load shedding is largely behind us due to structural improvements in the generation fleet,” said Marokane.

“While baseload capacity remains constrained, our generation recovery plan is addressing this challenge.”

“Achieving our goal of a stable energy availability factor of 65% -70% will significantly reduce the risk of load shedding.”

While the rest of the country deals with stage 3 for the whole period, the City of Cape Town will follow the following schedule over the weekend:

Friday, 07 March 2025

• Stage 1: 14:00 to 22:00
• Stage 3 22:00 to 23:59

Saturday, 08 March 2025

• Stage 3 00:00 to 06:00
• Stage 1: 06:00 to 12:00
• Stage 3: 12:00 to 23:59

Sunday, 09 March 2025

• Stage 3: 00:00 to 23:59

Monday, 10 March 2025

• Stage 3: 00:00 to 05:00