Ramokgopa warns of 'worrying' spike in Gauteng demand amid cold snap

Ramokgopa briefed the media on the governmen't efforts to end load shedding on Sunday.

This comes as Eskom is rolling varying stages of 2 and 4 blackouts over the weekend. 

"There’s a cold front, especially in the Gauteng area, I did say before that it accounts for a significant amount, about 25% of the load. It is something that is worrying and you are expecting that the demand is going to surge.

"If the improvements in relation to available capacity does not match the increases on the demand side, then the only corrective measure that we have is what we call load shedding. I am hopeful that we should be in a position to address that situation.

"It’s a short term and a long-term pain. Of course, all us are suffering as a result of load shedding. But when we get to a situation when we say we are out of load shedding, it’s important that we are able to give you the assurance that we are confident about these units being resilient, being able to carry us in the future."

Ramokgopa added that there has been some improvements in generation capacity to mitigate load shedding.

"As we said before, load shedding is an unwelcome occurrence, but the more we are able to illustrate that there’s gradual improvements in terms of the number of hours that your lights are on and off and we use this to measure the stages of load shedding.

"That’s why we try to ensure that by all means we don’t go beyond stage 4, and again we are looking forward to the subsequent weeks that we should be able to take it down."

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