Eskom’s De Ruyter warns against ‘fear mongering’ around total blackout

De Ruyter and members of the Eskom management team briefed the media on Wednesday amid the stage 4 rolling blackouts.

The struggling utility pushed load shedding to stage 4 on Tuesday due to a lack of generation capacity.

The myriad of issues facing the power grid has seen some experts warn that the system could be teetering on the brink of collapse.

But De Ruyter has moved to assure South Africans that this is not the case.

“We have never experienced a system blackout in SA, so we have to look further afield to see what happens. We have the example of a blackout that struck New York in 1978 and took them under a week to bring it back.

“Because we use alternating currency, once the total electricity supply is lost, restoring the supply is a gradual task that requires what we call ‘black start’ capabilities. So, we do have the capabilities to restart the grid, in the highly unlikely event that a total blackout was to occur,” said De Ruyter.

“But we are quite a long way away from a total system blackout or collapse and that is why the terminology matters when we discuss these things, so I would caution against speculation and fear-mongering stalking of speculations and fear.

“We do have plans in place, we have capabilities and we do not anticipate this as a credible risk at this moment in time.”

De Ruyter said on the contrary, the utility could reduce load shedding to stage 3 on Thursday and suspend it over the weekend.

“We have a chance of reducing load shedding tomorrow to stage 3. We will communicate based on the performance of the system and how that improves during the night.

“We are expecting a large number of units to return during the course of tomorrow, and if those units stay online, and perform as expected then we should be able to lift load-shedding at the start of the weekend.”

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