By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Embattled state owned power utility Eskom says that load shedding will be reduced to stage 2 on Sunday, from 05h00 on Sunday until 16h00.
Thereafter, Stage 3 load shedding will be implemented from 16h00 until 05h00 on Monday.
This is a result of the anticipated recovery of emergency reserves overnight, and the two generating units expected to return to service by Sunday.
On Thursday, an outage of five generating units at the Kendal power station triggered Stage 4 load shedding.
According to Eskom, the events that led to the loss of generating capacity at Kendal Power Station units are as follows:
- Kendal Unit 1 was taken offline on Wednesday at 20h00 due to leaking safety valves, which caused the capacity of the demineralised water storage tanks to run low.
- While recovering the storage water tanks, a contamination incident occurred in the water treatment plant, necessitating the isolation of the plant to investigate the root cause.
- During this period of investigation, the level of auxiliary cooling water, which also uses demineralised water, ran low.
- This led to capacity loss from four generating units at 2h00 in the morning.
The utility said that its teams have returned the first unit back into service, and two more are planned to be returned on Sunday, 25 February 2024.
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.