Load shedding to be suspended from 5am until 4pm on the weekend

Eskom has announced that this weekend will see load shedding suspended from 5am to 4pm on Saturday and Sunday, with stage 1 in force during the night.

“Due to the sustained performance of the generation fleet and the anticipated lower weekend electricity demand, stage 1 load shedding is in force and will continue until 5am on Saturday, as previously communicated,” the utility said.

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“Thereafter, load shedding will be suspended from 5am until 4pm when stage 1 load shedding will resume until 5am on Sunday. This pattern of suspending load shedding during the day and implementing stage 1 loadshedding in the evening will be repeated on Sunday.”

Eskom said it would closely monitor the power system and inform the public should any significant changes occur. Eskom will also provide the outlook for the week ahead on Sunday afternoon.

Solar and wind

On Wednesday, Eskom announced that load shedding would be suspended daily between 10am and 4pm due to sustained generation performance and lower demand for electricity during the day.

The country was at stage 2 at the time, and Eskom downgraded this to stage 1 in the evenings.

Moneyweb reported that this improvement is largely thanks to private-sector solar.

By its own estimates, Eskom has 5 200MW of what it terms “rooftop photovoltaic (PV)”. It uses normalised demand in an area in normal weather to calculate how much demand is foregone once solar PV is installed in a neighbourhood, office park or estate.

As of Wednesday, there is an – at least – 1 000MW practically guaranteed divergence between the supply before the sun actually starts beating down and later in the day. This has been in place for quite some time, where load shedding has been implemented at a reduced stage during the day.

However, when the generation shortfall is ‘only’ around 1 000MW and solar PV boosts generation way beyond this figure during daylight hours, it becomes possible to suspend load shedding, as has been the case during recent weeks.

The other major contributor to the reduction in the severity of load shedding is quite how much generation is supplied by the independent power producer (IPP) wind farms, especially in the evenings.

These can produce anything from around 1 000MW to well over 2 000MW. Eskom says its all-time peak contribution from wind has been 3 442.6MW from its contracted IPPs and its Sere wind farm with a maximum capacity of around 100MW.