Eskom had announced that it will be giving South Africans a gift of light as it suspends load shedding from 5am on Christmas Day until 5am on 26 December, implementing stage 2 until 4pm followed by stage 3.
The power utility said load shedding will be suspended on Christmas Day but this is only possible as long as demand stays low, and load shedding may have to be implemented at short notice.
Between 05:00 on Monday, 26 December 2022, and 16:00 on Tuesday, 27 December 2022, stage 2 load shedding will be implemented.
After that, Eskom will increase load shedding to stage 3 until further notice.
Eskom said the suspension of load shedding on Christmas Day was only possible due to the lower demand for electricity.
“Eskom appeals to all electricity users to conserve as much electricity as possible during this period,” the utility said.
It warned that the generation fleet remained unpredictable and vulnerable, which could necessitate load shedding.
“Should there be multiple failures of generators, a higher stage of load shedding may need to be implemented at short notice,” Eskom stated.
South Africa is likely to sit with prolonged levels of load shedding for the foreseeable future. On December 1,000MW was removed from the grid through Koeberg unit 1 being taken offline, and approximately 3,000MW is offline from various breakdowns at Kusile and Medupi.
According to Eskom’s outlook for the next year, it needs to keep breakdowns below 3,000MW to stave off the worst of load shedding, but the utility has struggled to keep outages below 16,000 MW-the worst-case scenario in its plans.
Meanwhile, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter announced his resignation on the back of the worst levels of load shedding on record.
Source: My Broadband, Business Tech, IOL, The Citizen, image from Twitter: @SABCNews