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Eskom has announced that load shedding has been temporarily suspended – until Monday afternoon.
The ailing parastatal made the initial announcement of the postponement of load shedding on Sunday morning in a tweet.
“Load shedding has been suspended at 12:00 today. Eskom will this afternoon publish a statement about the load shedding profile for next week.”
ALSO READ: Eskom shuts down Kusile unit after system failure
Just a few hours later, it was confirmed that stage 2 load shedding would return from 4pm on Monday, until 5am every morning, “until further notice”.
Eskom said nightly load shedding was necessary to “preserve emergency generation reserves”, owed to a high level of breakdowns.
As of Sunday morning, a generation unit at Kriel power station returned to service, but a unit returning at Majuba station has been delayed.
“We currently have 4 963MW on planned maintenance, while another 14 107MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns.”
On Friday, Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha said stage 1 load shedding would continue to be implemented daily at 5am until 4pm until Sunday.
“Stage 2 load shedding will also continue to be implemented on a daily basis at 4pm to 5am until Monday.”
Mantshantsha said the continuous implementation of the deliberate power cuts by Eskom was mainly due to the need to preserve emergency generation reserves owing to a high level of breakdowns and the delay in returning some generating units to service.
Meanwhile, Eskom’s shutdown of a unit of the Kusile power station due to a system failure has increased the prospect of exacerbated rolling blackouts.
Eskom last week said it anticipated that the Kusile unit may be offline for a few months.
The power utility explains that the duct is similar to a chimney, providing a channel for exhausting gases from the power station.
It said on 23 October exiting of the sulphur dioxide absorber failed on the horizontal rubber expansion joint as well as the compensator.
A compensator directs flue gas up the chimney and allows for thermal expansion of the chimney.
This occurred while the unit was on forced shutdown for flue gas de-sulphuration (FDG) recirculating pump repairs.
Mantshantsha said investigations and assessments are underway to determine the cause of failure of the Kusile unit, and to ascertain the extent of the damage, as well as the recovery scope of work.
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Additional reporting by Nica Richards.
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