Loadshedding pushed to Stage 6 indefinitely
Embattled power utility Eskom has announced the implementation of Stage 6 rolling blackouts until further notice.
The power utility made the announcement in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The implementation of Stage 6 rolling blackouts comes days after President Cyril Ramaphosa promised South Africans that his government has clear plans to end load shedding during his State of the Nation Address.
Ramaphosa said measures have been put in place through the National Energy Crisis Committee to ensure that load shedding becomes a thing of the past.
"We have delivered on our commitments to bring substantial new power through private investment to the grid, which is already helping to reduce load shedding.
"Last year, we implemented a major debt relief package that will enable Eskom to make investments in maintenance and transmission infrastructure and ensure its sustainability going forward."
"Since we revived our renewable energy program five years ago, we have connected more than 2,500 MW of solar and wind power to the grid with three times this amount already in procurement or construction."
"Through tax incentives and financial support, we have more than doubled the amount of rooftop solar capacity installed across the country in just the past year."
"We have implemented sweeping regulatory reforms to enable private investment in electricity generation, with more than 120 new private energy projects now in development," said Ramaphosa.
The president said the restructuring of the electricity sector is in line with what many other economies have done to increase competitiveness and bring down prices.
"To ensure that we never face a similar crisis ever again, we are reforming our energy system to make it more competitive, sustainable, and reliable into the future.
"We are going to build more than 14,000km of new transmission lines to accommodate renewable energy over the coming years.
"To fast-track this process, we will enable private investment in transmission infrastructure through a variety of innovative investment models," said Ramaphosa.
But soon after Ramaphosa's announcement, Eskom announced the return of stage 4 power cuts.
In a short statement, the utility said the escalated rolling blackouts were due to two generating units being taken offline.
"This combined with the need to replenish the pumped storage dams in preparation for the week ahead, necessitated the implementation of Stage 6 load shedding from midnight until further notice. Our teams are working diligently to return the generation units back online", Eskom said.
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