More pain as Eskom ramps up load shedding to stage 6

Eskom has announced that load shedding will be ramped up to stage 6 on Wednesday.

“Stage 6 load shedding will be implemented from 12:00 until further notice. This is due to a high number of breakdowns since midnight, as well as the requirement to strictly preserve the remaining emergency generation reserves. Eskom will publish a full statement in due course,” said Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha.

Eskom initially ramped up load shedding at short notice to stage 4 on Wednesday, citing a number of breakdowns and shortages in generation capacity.

The ailing parastatal has been under tremendous pressure to keep the lights on in the country.

What is stage 6

The last time the country experience stage 6 load shedding was in September 2022.

Under stage 6 load shedding, power needs to be shed from the country’s electricity system, leaving many without electricity for as much as eight hours a day, though that may be split into blocks of two hours.

This means the grid will need to shed 6 000 MW of power to keep the national power grid from collapsing, which will leave the state-owned power utility starting additional and unscheduled power cuts wherever it needs to, and outside of its schedules.

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No money for diesel

On Tuesday Eskom said it had asked National Treasury for R19.5 billion to buy diesel.

The parastatal said it had already spent R11 billion, double its budget on diesel for this financial year

Due to the depletion of its budget to acquire diesel for the open cycle gas turbines, it was forced to conserve the rest of its fuel reserves to protect against further unplanned outages, Eskom said on Tuesday.

More load shedding

South Africans will experience load shedding for at least another year, Mantshantsha said last week.

“The refuelling and maintenance outage starting this week, as well as the long-term operation project of Unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, together with the October chimney failure that has forced three generation units offline at Kusile Power Station, will further reduce available generation capacity and significantly increase the occurrence of load shedding during the next six to 12 months,” he said.

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