Eskom Chief Operations Officer Jan Oberholzer says South Africans may have to endure a week of load shedding due to a shortage of capacity.
This after the power utility tweeted there’s a possibility of rotational stage-two load shedding across the country until 23:00.
In a statement, Eskom says a conveyor belt supplying Medupi Power Station with coal failed on Saturday.
This resulted in low coal volumes being supplied to the power station and limiting its power output generation by half.
Oberholzer says Eskom is working on solving any technical issues.
“We believe it is going to take approximately a week to recover, that is our prediction at this point in time. We are trying to get things back as soon as possible, but the indication at this point in time is that it is going to take a week. Because of the poor performance of our system and the incident we are having at Medupi, we used a lot of our water and diesel reserves over the weekend. So that has been depleted now to a level that is becoming risky,” says Oberholzer.
Read the full Eskom Statement in the tweet below:
#PowerAlert 1 : Stage 2 loadshedding from 9:00 today pic.twitter.com/zDcjgjAGh9
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) October 16, 2019
