By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom announced on Sunday that load shedding will now be downgraded to Stage 4 until further notice.
This comes after the power utility implemented Stage 5 power cuts from 05:00 on Sunday morning after rolling out Stage 6 a week ago.
The load shedding stages will vary, dropping to stage 3 on Tuesday (28 February), and then returning to stage 3 and stage 4, Eskom said.
Over the past 24 hours, a generating unit each at the Arnot, Grootvlei, Kendal, Medupi and Tutuka power stations were returned to service. Breakdowns at a unit each at Camden, Majuba and Matimba power stations caused units to be taken offline for repairs.
The delay in returning a unit each to service at Arnot, Hendrina, Kendal, Medupi and Tutuka power stations are contributing to the current capacity constraints.
In addition to this, power imports from Mozambique have been halved to 600MW due to a line failure in that country.
Breakdowns account for 16,900MW being out of service, while 4,700MW is offline for planned maintenance.
For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.
Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.