Embattle Power Utility Eskom announced that it would reduce load shedding to stage 3 on Christmas Eve. But load shedding on Christmas Day is yet to be determined.
Stage 3 load shedding will run from Christmas Eve until 05:00 on Sunday 25 December, after which Eskom will confirm its load shedding arrangements for Christmas Day based on the state of the power system.
Eskom chief operations officer (COO) Jan Oberholzer said Eskom will do its best to keep the lights on for Christmas but warned that things could change very quickly.
“We will evaluate the system up until Sunday morning, and early on Sunday morning we will make a decision,” said Oberholzer.
“The current outlook indicates that we are going to utilise a lot of our emergency resources- water and diesel volumes- in order to stick to the intention not to have load shedding for at least a large part of Christmas Day.”
Aside from the Christmas update, Oberholzer said there are no other changes to the current load shedding outlook.
Oberholzer reiterated that with the current breakdowns, Koeberg 1 offline and Kusile and Medupi units still offline, South Africa is facing a difficult year ahead. “We see a challenging period ahead of us,” he said.
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 struggling to keep outages below 16,000MW- the worst-case scenario in its plans.
South Africa experienced a high record of stage 6 load shedding more than once in 2022 alone.
As mean to combat alleged sabotage at some of Eskom’s power stations during this festive season, President Cyril Ramaphosa has ordered SANDF troops to protect some of the power stations as a deterrent.
Source: IOL, Eyewitness news, Business Tech, My Broadband, image from Twitter: @JacaNews