Load shedding to continue through winter

THE electricity shortage situation remains grim, as load shedding will continue throughout winter.

This was announced by Public Enterprises Minister, Lynne Brown, during a media briefing on Wednesday. Brown said the parastatal’s decision to implement load shedding over the past few days was due to a shortage in generating capacity.

“This year, Eskom has been following its preventative maintenance schedules at the aging plants so that the recovery to sustainable and reliable power generation is expedited.

“This will understandably place strain on the system over the short term, as additional plant failures, as experienced over the past few days (which took us into stage two and stage three load shedding) might occur.

“Load shedding at stage three shows the seriousness of the constraints that we are facing, but it is in no way an indication that we are close to a black-out,” she said.

While she could not give further details on operational occurrences at various plants, the minister said Eskom’s acting chairperson, Dr Ben Ngubane, had provided her with a detailed report on what happened during the last week.

She said about 9 500 megawatts of power was lost when some units went off-line.

Load shedding will be with the country for the next two years, the minister said.

“The loss of a number of generating units early in the week reduced the available capacity to meet the demand on Monday.

“It is expected that the situation will continue throughout winter when consumption is higher, as the constraints on the grid mean that planned, controlled, and rotational load shedding and load curtailment are introduced to protect the power system.”