Eskom has announced that Stage 6 rolling blackouts will now be implemented continuously from four on Wednesday afternoon until further notice. The power utility says 11 generators amounting to 5 084MW of capacity suffered breakdowns since Tuesday morning.
These were a unit each at the Camden, Duvha, Grootvlei, Hendrina, Kendal, and two units each at Kriel, Majuba and Matla power stations. Eskom says it will continue to manage the limited emergency generation reserves to supplement generation capacity, and publish a further update as soon as there are any significant changes.
Stage 6 loadshedding will be implemented from 16:00 on Wednesday until further notice pic.twitter.com/8wLr5r1lNW
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) January 11, 2023
Higher stages of rolling blackouts
Earlier on Tuesday, Energy analyst Lungile Mashele said that South Africa could be looking at higher stages of rolling blackouts as things got back to normal, following the festive season shutdown of industries.
This week President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a resolution adopted by the governing African National Congress (ANC) at its national conference last week, that will see the energy department take over responsibility for overseeing Eskom.
The power utility has been facing power generating challenges since 2008, with 2022 being the worst year on record as far as rolling blackouts go.
Mashele said the outlook isn’t any better for this year.
“I don’t think anybody anticipated the 205 days. Even if you look at Eskom’s estimates, they had told us that in winter already that at the worst case we are looking at about 100 days, and it was far more than that. We basically loadshed every other third day in 2022, and I certainly don’t think things are going to get better in 2023 either. We are already on Stage 4, people are only going back to work now, children are only going back to school. Industry is starting to open up. By next week, we will be looking back at where we were just before that shutdown in December.”
Energy department to oversee Eskom:
