By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom announced a marginal drop in load shedding on Thursday due to improved generation recovery and emergency reserves.
Stage 3 load shedding kicked in at 10:00, and will continue until 16:00, when Stage 4 will resume. However, Stage 5 load shedding will be implemented from 20:00 until 05:00 on Friday, instead of the previous Stage 6.
This is the temporary schedule until Eskom communicates the forward-looking schedule later in the day.
The latest easing of load shedding follows a week full of stage 6 outages, which the group was forced to implement after it drained its emergency reserves.
According to analysis of its plant performance, it has become apparent that the group has been using what it can to boost its pumped storage levels, but ended up hitting diesel shortages.
The power utility has also had to contend with spikes in user demand and persistently high unplanned outages.
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.