Stage 5 is back … indefinitely

State power utility Eskom instituted Stage 5 load shedding indefinitely on Wednesday morning, citing “higher than anticipated demand” as temperatures drop around the country, in line with the beginning of winter.

Before this latest update, Eskom was implementing a combination of Stage 3 and 5 power cuts, with the latter only scheduled to kick in during evening peaks.

According to the utility, total generation demand around the country for the evening peak on Tuesday stood at 31 588 MW while Eskom was only able to supply 24 511MW in generation capacity.

Eskom has not yet provided detail on the state of its generation units, however, in an update it issued on Monday when the country was battling Stage 3 outages, the utility noted that unplanned generation unit breakdowns were taking away 14 940MW of generation capacity, while planned maintenance stood at 7 215MW.

Read: SA should not shy away from costs of fixing power crisis – Ramokgopa

In previous reports, Moneyweb has highlighted that to meet generation capacity demands for the upcoming winter season, Eskom would have to make sure unplanned breakdowns remained well under 16 000MW.

Further, to meet winter demand, Eskom had previously communicated plans to cut down significantly on planned maintenance and only remove about 2 000MW from the grid for this purpose.

Acting group spokesperson Daphne Mokwena said the power utility will provide further updates to the public on the state of the national grid during the day.

Read:

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