South Africa in for Another Week of Stage 2 Loadshedding

Eskom is expected to implement stage two load shedding from 5pm Tuesday evening until the early hours of next Monday morning.

These latest power cuts come after the energy supplier lost generation capacity at several power stations.

“This load shedding has been caused by a shortage of generation capacity owing to delays in returning generators to service as well as breakdowns of nine generators,” Eskom (which has been nicknamed Eishkom by many weary South Africans) said in a statement today.

“Since [Monday], a generation unit each at Lethabo, Tutuka, Ingula, Drakensberg, Arnot as well as two units each at Hendrina and Matla power stations suffered breakdowns. Further, delays in returning generators to service at Arnot, Kendal and three units at Tutuka power stations have added to the capacity constraints.”

The power utility explained that this led to an unexpected loss of at least 15 067MW of capacity with a further 3875MW of energy on a maintenance outage.

“Eskom expects to return as many of these units to service as possible over the next few days. We also expect to rely on the use of emergency generating reserves to limit the stage of load shedding during this period.”

Eskom reiterated that load shedding is only implemented as a “last resort to protect the national grid” and again requested that South Africans use electricity sparingly to reduce the occurrence of load shedding.