‘There is no load shedding from Monday,’ Eskom assures South Africans

As the country experiences load shedding for the first time in more than ten months, Eskom has assured South Africans that there will be no rolling blackouts from Monday going forward.

However, Eskom board chair Mteto Nyati said load shedding will continue throughout the weekend.

Nyati said the primary objective of load shedding was to build reserves that the parastatal has relied on heavily since the start of the week following breakdowns at six power units.

No load shedding

Nyati assured South Africans that the situation is improving and that there won’t be any load shedding from Monday.

“We started to see in early January, that things were sleeping, things which were supposed to come back to service were not coming back to service and that escalated. So, the good thing is now things are back to normal. There is the right oversight, proper leadership is in place once again and things are being managed in the right way,” he told eNCA.

“This weekend, we are focusing on replenishing our reserves and I’ve just had an update from our CEO [Dan Marokane] that already we are we thought we would be right now on a Saturday. When we look at it on Sunday, we think we are going to be exactly where we wanted to be.

“So, my sense is that there is not going to be any load shedding going forward, starting from Monday, as it has been promised by both the CEO and the minister [Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa]. So, that is really in a nutshell what happened,” Nyati said.

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Load shedding

Eskom on Friday announced that it will be implementing stage 3 load shedding from 5pm on Friday until Sunday night midnight to replenish power reserves.

Ramokgopa said the country has been hit by a “perfect storm”.

The minister provided an update on the country’s electricity generation performance on Friday following an announcement by the parastatal of a high risk of load shedding at short notice.

Ramokgopa said Eskom’s leadership was exceptionally disappointed that it had to take the step after 10 months without load shedding.

‘Perfect storm’

He explained that a “perfect storm” of multiple unplanned breakdowns and continued planned maintenance had resulted in the power utility depleting its emergency generation reserves in the past week.

“We’ve got hit by a perfect storm. So, what is that perfect storm? We’ve had units out for planned maintenance. But we had the situation where two of our best-performing power stations, Matimba and Lethabo, had a number of units failing at the beginning of the week. Other units were also delayed in coming back online.

“So as a result, for most of the week, we had to rely on our open cycle gas turbines (OCGT), essentially we were burning diesel,” Ramokgopa said.

Marokane said load shedding returning is a “potentially temporary setback”.

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