After suspending load shedding on Christmas Day, Eskom announced stage 1 load shedding will be implemented from 5am on Boxing Day until further notice.
Stage 1 load shedding will be implemented from 05h00 on Monday 26 December Boxing Day.
The group previously expected to implement stage 2 load shedding on Monday before escalating to stage 3 on Tuesday- however, stage 1 will continue until further notice it said.
“This is possible due to the low demand for electricity during the day, reducing the reliance on emergency generation reserves. We appeal to electricity consumers to continue using electricity sparingly,” the group said.
South Africa has been gripped with record high levels of load shedding blackouts in 2022.
The country has also experienced record high levels of stage 6 load shedding more than once, in 2022 alone, with fears that higher stages would also come into effect.
In previous years, Eskom has been able to avoid implementing load shedding during the entire week of Christmas and most of the festive season due to much lower power demand.
But the utility’s power plants have recorded their worst performance on record in the past few weeks.
According to energy expert Chris Yelland, week 50 of 2022 saw Eskom’s energy availability factor across all stations drop to 50.73%.
That means that its power plants were only delivering slightly above half their maximum potential capacity, due to substantially high levels of breakdowns.
South Africa is likely to sit with prolonged levels of load shedding for the foreseeable future. Last Saturday, 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.
Source: My Broadband, IOL, Business Tech, image from Twitter: @MBAdvertiser
