By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom has announced that load shedding will be suspended during daytime on Monday.
“Due to an improved generation system, as well as full recovery in emergency generation reserves, load shedding has been suspended from 11:30 until 16:00 [on Monday].
A further update will be published in the afternoon to determine the schedules moving ahead. The updated schedules will be published once they are known.
Eskom has been alternating between stage 1 load shedding during the day and stage 3 load shedding in the evenings since late last week.
While load shedding has been ongoing near-permanently, this has been an improvement on the high levels (up to stage 6) last seen in mid-July.
Despite the relatively lower stages of load shedding, South Africa now has a framework in case stage 16 load shedding hits.
The National energy regulator Nersa released a consultation document for public comment, which aims to restructure load shedding in South Africa.
It is proposed that the way load shedding is calculated changes to look at the percentage of demand shed instead of the number of thousands of MWs.
The new system allows for stage 16 load shedding, which would shed 80% of demand. However, Chair of the management committee of the National Rationalised Specifications Association of South Africa, Vally Padayachee, said that South Africa will likely never get to that level of power cuts.
South Africa’s power situation is expected to get better leading into the end of the year, with units at Kusile anticipated to return to operation and unit 1 of Koeber expected to come online in early November.
However, unit 2 of the nuclear plant is expected to go offline for maintenance soon thereafter, undercutting any benefit seen by unit 1’s return.
Meanwhile Eskom has described media reports about a church where its board chairperson is a congregant as simply sensational.
On Sunday, two separate newspapers published articles that the International Pentecostal Holiness Church where Mpho Makwana serves as secretary failed to pay its electricity debt of over R2 million.
The church, boasting 350 branches nationwide and about 3 million members, is alleged to receive its electricity directly from Eskom and not through the municipality.
Eskom has slammed the allegations, saying Makwana is not involved in any operational matters and has no influence on credit management processes.
Spokesperson, Daphne Mokwena: “Eskom finds the angle of the stories by the newspapers to be sensational. The organisation also finds the dragging/referencing of the chairman in this highly operational matter because of his religious affiliation, unnecessary. His freedom of association as enshrined in the Constitution may have been violated/trampled upon by this reporting.”
Mokwena said that these reports were concerning.
“Eskom fully supports media freedom and values the media as its key stakeholder, however, the organisation is concerned about what appears to be the misuse of media freedom by the newspapers in this instance.”