As South Africa enters the seventh day of the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown, Eskom has announced that it will double maintenance work at its plants.

“With the Covid-19 national lockdown in full effect, Eskom has experienced a significant reduction in demand for electricity. Electricity usage has dropped by between 7.5GW and 9GW since the lockdown came into effect last week. This has allowed Eskom to operate without the need to implement load shedding,” said the power utility.

The utility is making use of the low demand to carry out important short-term maintenance of generation infrastructure. To protect the integrity of the system, Eskom has taken some generation units offline.

From midnight on Friday, 3 April, Eskom will add Koeberg unit 2 to units taken off the grid. However, these will be able to return to service at short notice, should the need arise.

Koeberg unit 2 is scheduled to return to service by 30 April if not called before then.  — SANews