Heavy Rains Trip Eskom Units Leading to Stage 2 Loadshedding

The impact of heavy rains, caused by tropical storm Eloise, has resulted in Stage 2 load shedding in South Africa that will continue through the weekend. Eskom says the loadshedding, which has been implemented from noon today, has been exacerbated by the forced shutdown of five generating units at the Medupi Power Station. The power cuts are expected to continue until 23h00 on Sunday night, Eskom said in a statement.

The units tripped as a result of the inability to get coal into the units because of the heavy rain in the Lephalale area on Thursday evening.

“The area experienced 65 millimetre of rain, which added to the constraints caused by the heavy rains due to cyclone storm Eloise over the past two weeks.

“Eskom has implemented contingency plans and deployed additional resources to deal with the heavy rainfalls in the Mpumalanga, and Limpopo areas, and the teams’ area working hard to return as many of these units to service as soon as possible,” Eskom said.

Currently, Eskom has 4 114MW on planned maintenance, while another 15 739MW of capacity is unavailable due to unplanned maintenance.

Eskom urged the public to reduce electricity usage in order to help us minimize loadshedding.

“The system remains vulnerable and unpredictable. Loadshedding is implemented as a last resort in order to protect the integrity of the system. As previously communicated, Eskom continues to implement reliability maintenance during this period, and thus the system will continue to be constrained, with the risk of leadshedding remaining elevated,” Eskom said.

Sources: Eskom and SAnews.gov.za