Load shedding to continue until Monday morning due to Medupi failure

Eskom has confirmed that Stage 2 load shedding will continue until 5am on Monday morning.

“The system remains constrained and vulnerable, and as such load shedding Stage 2 will unfortunately have to continue from 08:00 this morning until 05:00 tomorrow morning (Monday 6 January).

“The conveyor belt failure at Medupi power station has since been repaired and the plant is feeding power to the grid. This incident, however, as well as a loss of additional generation units caused us to have deplete our diesel and pump storage levels, which we need to restore as we head into the working week on Monday.”

This follows the announcement of the first batch of SA’s unpopular ongoing rolling blackouts on Saturday evening.

In a statement, power utility Eskom announced it would be implementing stage 2 load shedding from 10pm until 8am on Sunday.

This is reportedly due to an unanticipated conveyor belt failure at Medupi Power Station resulting in the system being “severely constrained and vulnerable”.

Eskom says its teams continue to work tirelessly to return units back from planned and unplanned outages and vow to give citizens regular updates during the course of the day, as well as asking South Africans to reduce demand as a “concerted collective effort can help to avoid or reduce the level of load shedding”.

(Compiled by Daniel Friedman)

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