Eskom has denied claims in an article about municipalities being informed that stage 8 load shedding is imminent, as erroneous and incorrect.
In keeping with Eskom’s obligations in terms of the Disaster Management Act, it is required to develop contingency plans for identified major incidents.
A Severe Supply Constraint is one of these, for which we have plans in place. Eskom also continually improves these plans. According to a statement, each stage provides for a reduction in load of approximately 5% which equates to roughly 1000MW at peak. Stage 8 equates to approximately an 8000 MW deficit.
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“When Stage 6 load shedding was implemented in December, not all Metros or Municipalities had published their extended load shedding schedules. The Association of Municipal Electricity Utilities (AMEU) therefore engaged most of its members to confirm their compliance to the code – i.e. whether stages 5 to 8 had been published by those Metro’s that had not yet done so.”
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Eskom also ensured that its contingency planning addresses several high impact, low probability incidents such as this.
