By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
South Africa will return to Stage 1 load shedding from Monday morning, power utility Eskom has announced.
This follows the suspension of load shedding on Christmas day due to the lower demand for electricity.
The group previously expected to implement stage 2 load shedding on Monday before escalating to stage 3 on Tuesday – however, stage 1 will now continue until further notice, it said.
“This is possible due to the lower demand for electricity during the day, reducing the reliance on emergency generation reserves. We appeal to electricity consumers to continue using electricity sparingly,” the group said.
South Africa is likely to sit with prolonged levels of load shedding for the foreseeable future. Last Saturday (10 December) 1,000MW was removed from the grid through Koeberg unit 1 being taken offline, and approximately 3,000MW is offline from various breakdowns at Kusile and Medupi.
According to Eskom’s outlook for the next year, it needs to keep breakdowns below 13,000MW to stave off the worst of load shedding, but the utility has struggled to keep outages below 16,000MW – the worst-case scenario in its plans.
Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter announced his resignation this week on the back of the worst levels of load shedding on record. While Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan acknowledged that de Ruyter is not to blame for the load shedding, the power utility has not been able to resolve the crisis under his leadership.
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.