By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom has issued an alert warning of a high risk of needing to implement load-shedding up to Stage 4 at short notice.
This follows more than 10 months of uninterrupted electricity supply.
“This is a potentially temporary setback. Load-shedding is largely behind us due to the structural improvements in our generation fleet,” Eskom CEO Dan Marokane said in a statement.
“However, over the past seven days, we have experienced several breakdowns that require extended repair times. This has necessitated the use of all our emergency reserves, which now need to be replenished.”
“Consequently, we are closely monitoring the status of our current emergency reserves, and load-shedding up to Stage 4 may be implemented over the weekend,” he added.
This would be a significant setback for the state-owned power utility, which hasn’t had to implement load-shedding since late March 2024.
While load shedding has been suspended for a long time, energy experts have consistently warned that the energy crisis behind the outages is not over.
Eskom has seen a significant turnaround in its operations and has managed to restore a lot of its lost capacity, but the country still operates on a fine line between supply and demand.
The group’s summer outlook still had load shedding on the cards despite the likelihood of needing the outages being low.
Eskom’s 52-week outlook for 2025 also predicted risk scenarios where there would be a shortfall in energy supply, particularly around this time—the end of January and into February.