Johannesburg – Embattled power utility, Eskom has announced that loadshedding will be reduced to Stage 1 from 11pm on Sunday night until 5am on Monday morning and will resume to stage 2 from tomorrow.
Eskom said in a statement, “Regrettably, as the return to service of some generation units has been delayed, as well as the need to manage the emergency generation reserves and identified risks to the power system, stage 2 loadshedding will be implemented from 05:00 tomorrow morning. The system remains constrained and vulnerable, and Eskom will give a further update on the power situation tomorrow afternoon.”
Eskom said that the return to service of two generation units at Kusile power station that were not available last week has been delayed due to difficulties in restarting the units, which are now expected to return to service start tomorrow.
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Eskom said in a statement, “Over the past 24 hours Eskom teams have successfully returned a generation unit each at the Kriel, Groomei and Duvha power stations to service.
Despite Eskom’s stringent measures to manage the impact of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on the operations. We are experiencing some impact on operations including our suppliers. For example at the Medupi power station we have had 48 positive cases out of a pool of 75 contractors, which has negatively affected our ability to executive work as planned.”
“We currently have 6 384MW on planned maintenance, while another 13 181MW of capacity is unavailable due to unplanned maintenance, breakdowns and the outage delays mentioned above.”
Eskom urged the public to reduce electricity consumption in order to help minimize loadshedding.
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