Johannesburg – South Africans are urged to brace themselves for the rest of the weekend in darkness, as Eskom implements stage 2 load shedding from tonight at 9pm until Monday morning.
South Africa’s power utility Eskom made the announcement in a statement released on Saturday afternoon.
According to Eskom, the load shedding has been caused by a failure of a generation unit at Medupi, Kusile and Arnot power stations, and a delay of a unit returning to service at Tutuka power station.
In a released statement, the embattled power supplier said: “There was a reported failure of the coal conveyors at Medupi which led to reduced output at the station.
“There was also a complete shutdown of the Kendal power station ash plant due to an electrical fault. The ash plant has since returned to service and the ash backlog recovery is in progress,” Eskom said in a statement.
Eskom said that this has since been rectified, but would take some time to recover the full operations.
Due to generation capacity constraints, Stage 2 loadshedding will be implemented from 21:00 tonight until 05:00 on Monday morning pic.twitter.com/ksc6RSDqIj
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) December 4, 2021
The power utility said as a matter of result, total break downs have increased to 14 727 megawatts, while planned maintenance is 6 711 megawatts of capacity.
Eskom mentioned that constraints, together with higher demand on Friday and Saturday, have resulted in extensive usage of emergency generation reserves.
Stage 2 load shedding will run concurrently until Monday, at 5am.
Follow @SundayWorldZA on Twitter and @sundayworldza on Instagram, or like our Facebook Page, Sunday World, by clicking here for the latest breaking news in South Africa. To Subscribe to Sunday World, click here
