Eskom suspends load shedding from 9pm tonight

Eskom has announced that it will be suspending load-shedding on Sunday night at 9pm.

The parastatal is yet to release further details, but it’s ending the power cuts ahead of its original announcement, which stated that load shedding would continue into the early hours of Monday morning.

Eskom implemented Stage 2 load shedding last Wednesday, due to a shortage of generation capacity.

The power giant said that it needed to urgently replenish its reserve supplies of water and diesel after several unplanned breakdowns two weeks ago.

The power utility said load shedding was the prudent step to take to prevent a national blackout.

During a state of the systems briefing last week, Eskom CEO Andre De Ruyter likened the condition of the national grid to a “cardiac arrest”.

“We had the system equivalent of a cardiac arrest, and load shedding is the prudent step to take to prevent a national blackout,” said De Ruyter.

By Friday, Eskom said it had made good progress in replenishing its stocks and moved the country to Stage 1 load shedding.

Planned maintenance problems

Eskom’s Project Director Philip Dukahse last week admitted that Eskom had underestimated the maintenance process.

“The key to planned outages is readiness. We need 80% readiness from the time the unit goes offline,” said Dukashe.

De Ruyter had emphasised that funds needed to be readily available to order resources on time so that they are delivered at the time the plant goes offline.

He said sometimes the scope of the maintenance is far greater than was originally planned for because regular servicing was not done in the past.

But Dukashe says they are forging long-term contracts with suppliers to ensure that materials are available during the repair process.

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