Loadshedding reduced to stage 4
Eskom has announced that loadshedding was lowered to Stage 4 from just after midnight and effective until further notice.
This follows the implementation of Stage 6 on Sunday morning that was caused by multiple unit trips at three of Eskom’s power stations.
The reduction in load-shedding comes after the successful recovery of five units at Majuba, two at Camden, and one at Medupi yesterday.
This brings the total to eight out of ten generation units that had tripped over the weekend.
According to Eskom, the recovery of these units followed the identification of the root causes of the trips, which were unrelated but technical in nature, involving electrical and control system issues in the power stations' auxiliary parts.
Stage 6 loadshedding was preceded by Stage 3 on Friday, triggered by multiple unit trips at Majuba and a unit trip at Medupi and leading to a loss of 3 864 MW in generation capacity.
Planned maintenance accounted for 7 506 MW.
In a Sunday press briefing, Energy and Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa assured that loadshedding would be resolved by the end of the week, and the country should be out of this "difficult" situation soon.
“I'm confident that by the end of the week, we should be out of this difficult situation. We are confident we're going to go to conditions of normality. By the end of the week, there will not be [any] load shedding. We would have gone through this wave and of course, we want the country to get accustomed to being normal.”
He expressed confidence that South Africa would eventually reach a point of no loadshedding.
“And in fact, something called loadshedding should be considered extremely abnormal.”
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