After weeks of chaos, load shedding is expected to end this week

Rolling load shedding should come to an end by the end of this week as more power generation units come online, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter said.

Last month, Eskom started implementing stage-6 power cuts  for only the second time in its history.

The level of the outages has since been lowered, with stage 2, 3 and 4 power cuts at different times last week. Eskom blamed the outages on striking workers hampering efforts to bring faulty generation units back online.

“Towards the end of the coming week, we should emerge from load shedding. We’ve already lifted our indication for load shedding going forward; we’ve got a couple of big units returning so that’s positive news,” De Ruyter told journalists on Saturday.

He added that towards the end of July, the risk would be significantly diminished once unit 2 of the Koeberg nuclear power station came back onto the grid, which “is about 920MW, so that will bring large measure of relief”.

“But ultimately to put load shedding to bed, what we need is additional capacity because the system as it is at the moment is still unreliable and unpredictable,” De Ruyter said.

He was speaking at a brief news conference at Tutuka power station in Mpumalanga province after a site visit and meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa, some ministers and managers of the plant for a progress report.

Eskom relies on an ageing coal fleet that is highly prone to faults. South Africa has faced intermittent power cuts for more than a decade that have hindered economic growth.  — (c) 2022 Reuters