By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom escalated load-shedding from stage 3 to stage 6 in early hours of the morning, marking a significant deterioration in power supply situation.
The escalation to Stage 6 was “essential” after multiple trips at the Camden power station, Eskom said. The cuts will continue until further notice.
“This measure followed the implementation of Stage 3 [earlier], necessitated by multiple unit trips at Majuba power station and a unit trip at Medupi that resulted in a loss of 3 864 MW in generation capacity.”
The power utility will brief the media at 11:00 on Sunday to provide more details.
This marks the first time since 10 February 2024 that Eskom has had to resort to stage 6 load-shedding, the most severe level of power cuts it has officially announced to date.
While Eskom has improved its performance over the last year and managed to keep lights on most of the time, the group’s capacity issues have not fundamentally shifted.
Any setbacks or interruptions risk plunging the country back into darkness.
Last month, the power utility’s CEO, Dan Marokane, said the late-January power cuts were a “temporary setback,” as load shedding is “largely behind us due to structural improvements in the generation fleet.”
Economists at the Bureau for Economic Research warned in February that the power crisis in South Africa is far from over, and the grid is walking on a knife’s edge.
It said that hourly data shows that the situation can deteriorate rapidly, and load shedding can spring back – as it now has – with very short notice.
On top of this, the economists added that, even with no load shedding or its sporadic return, the electricity grid is still constraining economic growth.
“The lack of a stable, predictable supply of electricity remains a significant brake on economic growth. If growth were to accelerate rapidly, the risk of another round of load-shedding would rise,” the BER said.