President Ramaphosa, in last night’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) in Cape Town, expressed confidence in the imminent end of load shedding. This is as South Africa battles intermittent power outages.
The rolling blackouts have affected the economy, forcing the World Bank to revise the country’s growth prospects for 2024. Currently, the country has been shuttling between Stages Two and Three over the past few weeks.
“We are confident that the worst is behind us and the end of load shedding is finally within reach. But we are not stopping there. To ensure that we never face a similar crisis ever again, we are reforming our energy system to make it more competitive, sustainable and reliable into the future. We are going to build over 14 000 kilometres of new transmission lines to accommodate renewable energy over the coming years,” said Ramaphosa.
Early on Friday morning, power utility Eskom ramped up rolling blackouts to Stage 4 until further notice, as two additional generation units were taken out of service for repairs.
VIDEO: SONA 2024| Discussion on load shedding, youth unemployment and accountability
