Embattled power utility Eskom has announced that load shedding will move to stage 6 at 21:00 on Tuesday, 10 January 2022.
It will continue until 05:00 on Wednesday, after which load shedding will drop to stage 4 until 16:00, with this pattern repeated until further notice.
“Stage 6 nightly load shedding will be implemented at 16:00-05:00 until further notice. Stage 4 load shedding will be implemented at 05:00-16:00 daily until further notice,” Eskom said.
The power utility made the announcement just before 20:00 on Tuesday. It says the escalation is due to seven units having tripped on Tuesday- with only three having been returned to service.
Furthermore, the return to service of three other units has been delayed.
“Unit 1 of Matla Power Station will be shut down tonight to repair a boiler tube leak,” said Eskom.
The power utility will promptly communicate a further update as soon as there are any significant changes.
The struggling power utility implemented record load shedding in 2022- amounting to 3,776 hours or 157 days, according to EskomSePush app. Thus far, South Africans have faced the rolling blackouts every day in 2023.
South Africa is likely to sit with prolonged levels of load shedding for the foreseeable future. In December 2022, 1000MW was removed from the grid through Koeberg unit 1 being taken offline, and approximately 3,000MW is offline from various breakdowns at Kusile and Medupi.
According to Eskom’s outlook for next year, it needs to keep breakdowns below 13,000MW to stave off the worst 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, Moneyweb, image from Twitter: @lovabledaniels_