Rolling blackouts could return to South Africa as early as Thursday evening, Eskom warned in a statement.

The embattled state-owned power utility said the electricity system was “under stress” on Thursday morning and that it was using diesel generators to meet daytime demand.

“The units that were expected to come back from maintenance were delayed, which led to diesel generators being used overnight,” it said.

“While we have adequate emergency reserves to supplement capacity during the day, we may need to implement load shedding this evening to augment diesel and water at our open-cycle gas turbines and pumped storage schemes respectively.”

Unplanned outages were at 13.1GW on Thursday morning, up from 12.6GW on Wednesday. That was above its target of 9.5GW.  — (c) 2020 NewsCentral Media