By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Load shedding has been suspended on Sunday, but Stage 2 load will be implemented daily from Monday at 16:00 from 05:00 until further notice, Eskom said in a statement.
Eskom said that the nightly implementation of load shedding is mainly due to the need to preserve emergency generation reserves owing to a high level of breakdowns.
“This morning, a generation unit at Kriel Power Station was returned to service while the return to service of a unit at Majuba Power Station has been delayed,” it said.
“We currently have 4,963MW on planned maintenance, while another 14,107MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns.”
The load shedding schedule for the week follows rolling blackouts being suspended on Sunday.
As South Africa suffer through the worst year of load shedding on record, the embattled power utility has placed the blame on a host of issues at the company – but most of all its ageing fleet of power stations.
A deep dive done by Daily Investor, however, has countered this claim, finding that Eskom’s oldest power stations are in fact more efficient and more available than the group’s newer stations.
Earlier this week, Eskom notified the public that one of its units at the ‘new’ Kusile power stations experienced a fault and would likely be out of commission for a few months – joining other problems at the station and others at Medupi – the other ‘new’ station in the fleet.
Instead of an ageing fleet, Daily Investor said, Eskom’s real problem lies in a lack of technical and expert skills needed to keep the power stations going. This has occurred because of a concerted effort from the group and the government at large to implement affirmative action and BEE practices that have kicked out most of the skills.
However, state-owned companies, including Eskom, may now be able to shake off these strict requirements, at least when it comes to procurement and other parts of the business due to changes in the affiliated regulations.
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.