By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
State owned power utility Eskom has given its latest load shedding update, laying out the expected schedule through to Sunday (30 October).
Stage 4 load shedding will continue until Friday, it said, before dropping to lower stages for the weekend.
The schedule is as follows:
Thursday, 27 October
- Stage 3 – 05h00 – 16h00
- Stage 4 – 16h00 – 00h00
Friday, 28 October
- Stage 4 – 00h00 – 05h00
- Stage 2 – 05h00 – 16h00
- Stage 3 – 16h00 – 00h00
Saturday, 29 October
- Stage 3 – 00h00 – 05h00
- Stage 1 – 05h00 – 16h00
- Stage 2 – 16h00 – 00h00
Sunday, 30 October
- Stage 2 – 00h00 – 05h00
- Stage 2 – 16h00 – 00h00
The group said that the continued load shedding is necessary as its emergency reserves are almost depleted.
“The emergency generation reserves are almost depleted, both the diesel and pumped storage dam levels. These, together with persistent high levels of breakdowns of generating units, are among the major contributors to the continuing generation capacity shortages,” it said.
Eskom will publish a further update as soon as any significant changes occur.
Since Tuesday evening, Eskom teams have returned a generating unit each at Duvha, Kendal and Medupi power stations to service.
The utility currently has 5,683MW on planned maintenance, while another 1, 585MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns.
Load shedding is expected to be a part of life in South Africa for the foreseeable future, with new energy builds still years away from coming online to relieve the country’s grid.
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.