By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom has announced it will increase its planned load-shedding stages to an alternating rotation of stage 4 and stage 5 from Wednesday.
Stage 3 load shedding will continue to be implemented until 16h00 on Tuesday, the group said, but will move up to stage 4 in the evening.
Stage 4 load shedding will be implemented until 16h00 on Wednesday before moving up to stage 5 overnight.
The pattern of stage 4 during the day and stage 5 in the evening will continue until further notice, it said.
Despite returning a unit each at Camden, Kriel, Matla, and Matimba power stations, breakdowns stood at 19,031MW.
The utility said it suffered breakdowns of four generating units — one each at Duvha, Lethabo, Majuba and Tutuka power stations — over the past 24 hours.
It was also struggling with delays in returning a unit each to service at Arnot, Camden, Duvha and Kendal power stations.
Despite returning a unit each at Camden, Kriel, Matla, and Matimba power stations, breakdowns stood at 19,031MW.
Eskom also had 4,174MW of generating capacity out of service for planned maintenance.
The utility will publish another update as soon as any significant changes occur.
South Africa has experienced near-permanent load shedding since September 2022 and has suffered through rolling blackouts – usually at high levels – every day of 2023 so far.
While social groups and political parties have approached the courts in a bid to bring the outages to a stop, Eskom and former CEO Andre de Ruyter have warned that interfering with the load shedding schedules would likely lead to a grid collapse and total blackout.
Load shedding is implemented as a last resort to protect the grid from collapse – forcing Eskom to keep the lights on would not address the underlying issue of a lack of generating capacity.
Plans are in place to add more capacity to the grid, but unfortunately, none of these are short-term quick fixes, and the country is likely to keep experiencing rolling blackouts for the next two years at least.
The Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs has gazetted new regulations under the national state of disaster to fast-track new generation builds and unlock resources to try and mitigate the impact of load shedding.
Meanwhile President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday broke his silence over an interview given by de Ruyter.
Ramaphosa said de Ruyter “should have gone to any of our law enforcement institutions with the information he purports to have.”
“Those are institutions that have no outside influence and would interrogate the matter without fear and favour, “said Ramaphosa.
This comes after the former Eskom CEO said there was political protection for some of those blundering the power utility, alleging that there was a high-level ANC politician involved in the corruption.
De Ruyter dropped bombshells about R1 billion that was still being lost due to corruption, and that the power utility was a feeding trough for the ANC.
Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen meanwhile has written a letter to National Assembly Speaker, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, requesting the urgent establishment of an ad hoc parliamentary committee to investigate allegations of corruption at Eskom involving the ANC.
Steenhuisen said he wrote to Mapisa-Nqakula requesting the establishment of the ad hoc committee because the nation needs to know the “full, unvarnished truth” of the graft claims at Eskom.
Parliament needs to take the lead and institute a thorough inquiry into the full extent of the ANC’s criminal capture at Eskom.