By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Eskom will host the State of the System virtual briefing on Monday, 25 October 2021 from 09:00 until 12:00 where Eskom’s management team will provide details of the company’s operational performance.
However, power cuts will resume at 9pm on Monday night, and has been scheduled to take place on Tuesday night as well, Eskom said in a statement released on Sunday.
The power utility said it had made “some progress” in replenishing emergency generation reserves.
But it lost Koeberg Unit 1 on Sunday morning due to a fault on a feedwater pump, which means it will likely need to use emergency reserves extensively over the next few days to avoid further load shedding.
The only way to achieve this, ironically, is to implement stage 2 load shedding on Monday and Tuesday night.
Once Koeberg’s feedwater pump issue is resolved and the reactor side of the nuclear plant restarted, it will be business as usual. This is expected to take place sometime during the week.
One unit at Tutuka and Hendrina power stations, and two Kusile units, have also returned to service.
Meanwhile City Power says its customers will not be affected by load shedding in the coming days, as it believes a new power provision deal should be able to cushion them.
“City Power would like to inform its customers that we are not going to be load shedding them as per Eskom’s directive,” it said in a statement.
But most residents in Soweto, Sandton, Diepsloot, Ivory Park and Orange Farm still get their power directly from Eskom, and will be hit by load shedding.
South Africa is currently experiencing Stage 2 load shedding, which will be suspended at 05:00 on Monday. It will then resume at 21:00 on Monday until 05:00 on Tuesday. In addition, more Stage 2 load shedding is planned from 21:00 on Tuesday to 05:00 on Wednesday.
The City of Johannesburg recently struck a deal to get an additional 220MW from the privately owned Kelvin power station.
“We therefore believe that with this extra capacity, we will be able to cushion the residents of the city from the inconvenience of load shedding stages 1 and 2,” City Power said.