Eskom has announced that stage two load shedding will continue on Friday and Saturday from 9am to 6pm.

In a statement, the power utility says this is due to a shortage of capacity and a highly constrained system.

Power cuts began on Thursday, but were suspended at 05:00 on Friday morning.

Eskom’s Chief Operations Officer, Jan Oberholzer says the power stations have not been maintained over the past decade.

“Since Monday we have lost 10 of our power stations, so we had some trips. The situation we have is we are currently 130 000 megawatts because of unplanned outages. We had to use a lot of water reserves, and we depleted that, and we had to make a decision to implement load shedding because there hasn’t been proper maintenance over the last decade.”