Power utility Eskom has announced its plans to suspend load shedding on New Year’s Even and New Year’s Day.
The utility said it would continue with its current rotation of stage 3 during the day and stage 4 in the evening on Friday, 30 December 2022, and the early hours of Saturday, 31 December 2022.
Stage 4 load shedding will be implemented from 16:00 (30 December) until 05:00 in the morning (31 December).
Thereafter, stage 2 load shedding will be implemented from 05:00 until 16:00 on 31 December.
Load shedding will then be suspended until Monday, 2 January 2023, whereby stage 2 load shedding will be implemented until further notice.
Eskom did not elaborate on the state of the generation capacity and how it was able to reduce and suspend load shedding during the period.
Historically, it has only ever implemented load shedding on the last day of the year on one occasion and just for the early morning hours.
Should it be able to stick to its current load shedding plan, it will implement load shedding for 16 hours on 31 December 2022.
More than half of 2022 has seen days with load shedding, with South Africa hitting the 200 day mark on Tuesday (27 December)- and things are only expected to ger worse in 2023.
South Africa is expected to sit with prolonged levels of load shedding for the foreseeable future. On Saturday (10 December) 1,000MW was removed from the grid through Koeberg unit 1 being taken offline, and approximately 3,000MW is offline from various breakdowns from Kusile and Medupi.
According to Eskom’s outlook for 2023, it needs to keep breakdowns below 13,000MW to stave off the worst of load shedding, but the utility has struggled to keep outages below 16,000MW- the worst-case scenario in its plans.
Source: Business Tech, My Broadband, Sowetan Live, Times Live, Eyewitness News, image from Twitter: @SABreakingNews