Good news for load shedding in South Africa

Eskom says South Africans can breathe easy with no load shedding expected in winter, but warned that it has still planned for stage 2 outages in the worst case scenario.

Delivering its winter outlook for 2025, Eskom said its base case sees no load shedding in winter, outside of the one day already experienced in April.

However, should demand exceed expectations—and should breakdowns and unplanned outages grow—the country could see 21 days of stage 2 load shedding in the “worst case” scenario.

The outlook is based on expected breakdowns between 13,000MW and 15,000MW, which is lower than the 17,000MW expectation in 2024.

Crucially, no load shedding is expected if breakdowns remain below 13,000MW, Eskom said.

While Eskom stressed that the worst case isn’t the ‘expected’ case, the last few months have shown that circumstances can change very quickly and load shedding can kick in at very short notice.

South Africa has experienced five ’rounds’ of load shedding in 2025, which happened at short notice, typically following the loss of multiple units across key power stations.

Notably, this was counter to its summer outlook, which anticipated no load shedding and stage 1 load shedding at worst. Instead, the country saw 14 days of load shedding between stage 2 and stage 6.

Despite this, Eskom said the outlook going into winter is more positive.

Working in Eskom’s favour, Medupi Unit 4 is expected to return in the coming months. The unit has been out of service since August 2021, when it was downed by an explosion.

It has been out of service for a long time, but it should soon be adding 800MW of energy to the grid for the winter period.

Medupi is anticipated to be back online by the end of May, returning to full service in the following weeks.

With Kusile Unit 6 also in the mix, and Koeberg Unit 1 expected by July, this should help Eskom avoid load shedding.

There should be about 2,500MW more available than a year ago, it said.

Load reduction still on the cards

Eskom said that load reduction may still be necessary in the coming period to protect the grid.

Load reduction happens on a more localised level and is usually the result of excessive use and overloading due to illegal connections.

The utility said that it is working with law enforcement to remove illegal connections and to protect the stability of the grid.

Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said that Eskom is moving from “ending load shedding” and transitioning to “energy security”.

When the country experiences bouts of load shedding, this is a setback, but it is not a return to the constant load shedding of the past.

The focus is now to end load reduction, he said, which involves working closely with every township, town, city and municipality to resolve the issue.

Eskom says that it experiences significant weaknesses on the distribution side, where it has the electrons, but can’t get it to the end-user due to local issues.

It said that if demand exceeds the threshold at a local level, load reduction kicks in as a temporary measure.

The utility said that it needs the government, municipalities and local communities to work with it to protect infrastructure to end load reduction.

The worst areas are currently in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and Limpopo.

It said it will accelerate the rollout of smart meters which will allow it to implement load limiting to insulate communities from load reduction and load shedding.