Having been without load shedding since the 24th of April, Eskom has announced that it has implemented stage 1 rolling blackouts from 18h00.<\/p>\n
Load shedding is expected to continue until 22h00, Eskom said.<\/p>\n
The news follows a day of Eskom celebrating its successful maintenance schedule which took place over the long weekend.<\/p>\n
Eskom\u2019s acting Chief Executive Brian Molefe said in a statement on Tuesday the maintenance teams were able to perform planned maintenance on 2 303 MW of generating plant over the long weekend. They also returned 1 643 MW of generating capacity back to service.<\/p>\n
“Besides the 1600MW of planned outages brought back online over the long-weekend, unplanned outages are down from 9 500MW to about 6000MW,” Eskom said.<\/p>\n
The company also noted that unit 6 of the Medupi power station produced over 500MW on Tuesday, “making steady progress towards the targeted 800MW by June this year”.<\/p>\n
Energy expert, Chris Yellend warned, however, that South African’s shouldn’t get optimistic about the apparent lull in load shedding, saying that blackouts would definitely be back, and would continue for the next two years.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem cannot be solved overnight and it requires major investment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
These areas are exempt from load shedding<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n