Load shedding eased to stage 4, Eskom announces

Eskom has reduced load shedding to stage 4 until further notice due to the recovery of units at three power stations.

This after the parastatal ramped the rolling blackout from stage 3 to stage 6 in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Stage 4

Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena said load shedding was downgraded to stage from 12:30 am on Monday.

“This follows the successful recovery of all five units at Majuba, two units at Camden, and one unit at Medupi since Saturday, totalling eight out of ten generation units that had tripped this weekend.

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Replenishment

Mokwena said emergency reserves replenishment is progressing well.

“The return of these units comes after identifying the root causes of multiple unit trips, which were unconnected and purely technical in nature, related to electrical and control system issues in auxiliary parts of these power stations.

“Planned maintenance stands at 7 706MW. Eskom will provide an update on Monday afternoon,” Mokwena said.

Maintenance

On Sunday, Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said the current bout of load shedding resulted from Eskom’s aggressive maintenance plan.

“Currently, 7 500MW of Eskom generation is now offline due to planned maintenance, which is significantly higher than the same time last year. We have accepted that there are inherent risks in this decision that we are taking,” Ramokgopa said

“We are going to place a number of units at risk, and when they fail, the failure might be catastrophic – requiring us to take even significantly greater decisions for us to be able to protect. [But] we can’t postpone this maintenance of these assets,” Ramokgopa said.

No misdeeds

While many speculated what may have contributed to the rolling blackouts, Ramokgopa said there was no evidence of misdeeds contributing to the weekend’s breakdowns at the various power stations and load shedding being ramped up to stage 6.

“We must not find any reason to manufacture explanations of why we are at stage 6 and point fingers somewhere else.

“We are the ones who bear the responsibility and we are the ones who are going to illustrate to you how we are going to get out of this very difficult position. I’m confident that by the end of the week we should be out of this difficult situation,” Ramokgopa said.

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