South Africans will have extended load shedding on Thursday, following a further loss of capacity on Eskom’s grid overnight.<\/p>\n
The power utility announced that stage 2 load shedding will be implemented from 08h00 on Thursday, and will continue overnight until 06h00 on Friday.<\/p>\n
This follows two nights in a row where load shedding was implemented in the early morning hours, but not during the day.<\/p>\n
According to Eskom, the reason for the extended load shedding hours is because it lost further generating units at it power stations, resulting in unplanned outages of 14,000MW of capacity.<\/p>\n
Further, its reserves are not enough to keep the lights on consistently throughout the day.<\/p>\n
“Owing to inadequate maintenance over a number of years, the system remains vulnerable to unplanned outages,” it said. “Our teams continue to work tirelessly to return units from planned and unplanned outages.”<\/p>\n
It said that the system remains severely constrained and unpredictable.<\/p>\n