By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Load shedding will drop to Stage 1 until 16:00 on Monday, before jumping back up to Stage 3 for the evening, Eskom has announced.
From 05h00 on Tuesday, stage 2 will again be in effect until 16h00, thereafter pushing up to stage 4.
Eskom said the stage 2 and stage 4 rotation will continue until further notice.
The power utility said the de-escalation of load shedding on Monday is due to improved generation capacity and performance.
This puts this week off to a better start than last week, where stage 6 load shedding was in effect for most of the time – only being downgraded as the weekend approached.
The relief also comes as Kusile Power Station’s Unit 4 has returned to service bringing back 800 megawatts, which was taken off during the unit’s 20-day planned maintenance.
Minister in the Presidency for Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Sunday that other units at Kusile would be returning sooner than expected, which would put the country on better footing in the last quarter of the year.
Units 1, 2 and 3 of the power station located in Mpumalanga were put offline due to a flue-gas desulphurisation (FGD) mechanism that was damaged in October last year. This affected stacks at the units.
These are now expected to come online between October and the end of November 2023.
“We’ve been able to shed a month on the return of unit 3, and the expectation is that we should be able to return this unit by 14 October. The same is applicable for unit 1. We should be able to get it on 30 October,” he said.