Embattled power utility Eskom has pushed load shedding back to stage 6 on Friday morning (16 December) following multiple breakdowns at its power stations.
“At 08:34 stage 6 load shedding was implemented,” said Eskom in a Tweet.
“This was necessary due to the failure of 8 generating units overnight and the excessive reliance on OCGT’s and pumped storage generation that is rapidly depleting these reserves.”
Eskom will give an update in due course, it said.
The power utility had initially intended to keep load shedding at stage 4 and then de-escalating to stage 3 for the week ahead.
South Africa is likely to sit with prolonged levels of load shedding for the foreseeable future. Last Saturday (10 December), 1,000MW was removed from the grid through Koeberg unit 1 being offline, and approximately 3,000MW is offline from various breakdowns at Kusile and Medupi power stations.
According to Eskom’s outlook for the next year, it needs to keep breakdowns below 13,000MW to stave off the worst load shedding, but the utility has been seriously struggling to keep outages below 16,000MW which is deemed the worst-case scenario in its plans.
This news follows Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter saying yesterday saying that a fire at Matla power station in Mpumalanga did not cause major damage.
Videos were circulating online which showed lots of smoke rising from the power station- and it was believed that this was caused by a large fire.
“The damage to the unit is not severe -it’s mainly cabling, there is no structural damage- and our teams are hard at work to the return to service,” De Ruyter reassured the public at an Eskom press conference.
However, he was not able to give a time frame on when the unit would be restored.
Source: Business Tech, My Broadband, Eyewitness News, image from Twitter: @Powerfm987