Eskom hoping to ease load shedding on Thursday evening

De Ruyter and members of the Eskom management team briefed the media on Thursday morning on their efforts to keep the lights on.

South Africans have been in the grip of various stages of load shedding since Saturday due to a lack of generation capacity.

De Ruyter was able to provide some good news on Thursday morning thanks to an improvement in the system.

He said the utility hopes to lift the power cuts before the weekend.

“The system is recovering, we are seeing some of the peak units coming back as planned. Demand forecast for this evening is just shy of 30 000 MW, our available capacity is at 28220 MW, which explains why we have to maintain load shedding stage 3 until after evening peak tonight.

We intend to drop it to stage 2 and then after the evening peak on Friday, we will be hopefully in a position to lift load shedding in its entirety for the weekend depending on how the system performs.”

At this stage Eskom is not anticipating any load shedding next week, but this could change at short notice.

“The prognosis at the moment is that we don’t anticipate load shedding for next week. However, that is dependent on the stability of our generation unit as there are risks in the system that are difficult to forecast or predict.

“Depending on how we perform over the weekend, and the additional rainfall that has been forecast over the weekend for the Mpumalanga area where the majority of our coal plants are located, we may see further impacts and that may have an impact on the availability of generation capacity, particularly for Monday next week.

“So Monday next week is likely to be tight but after that, if we can bring some units back then we should be okay. So we don’t plan for load shedding next week but there is a residual risk.”

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