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Load shedding pushed to stage 4 as Eskom suffers more breakdowns

admin December 4, 2022

2 minutes read

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Eskom has announced that load shedding will be pushed to stage 4 with immediate effect following further breakdowns at its power stations.

Stage 4 load shedding will remain in effect until 05h00 on Monday (5 December), at least.

“This is to conserve the limited diesel stocks and to create space to replenish the dam levels in the pumped storage schemes,” Eskom said.

All-day load shedding has been in effect since Friday after the power utility suffered six breakdowns at its stations. Further updates are expected.

Eskom warned that the chance of load shedding occurring over the next six to 12 months will be greatly increased as it deals with key units being off the grid.

“The imminent refuelling and maintenance outage, as well as the long-term operation project of Unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, together with the October chimney failure that has forced three generation units offline at Kusile Power Station, will further reduce available generation capacity and significantly increase the occurrence of loadshedding during the next six to twelve months,” it siad.

“Eskom requests the public to exercise patience and tolerance during this difficult period

Eskom recently published its Week 47 outlook for the grid, saying that it expects to have enough capacity over the festive seasons to stage off load shedding for Christmas and New Year’s eve.

However, this comes with the sacrifice of much-needed maintenance.

Instead of the 8,956MW of generating capacity it had planned to take down for maintenance in the week of 19–25 December 2022 in the past few weeks’ system status outlooks, it now said it would only take down 6,641MW.

The difference of 2,315MW works out to about 26% less planned maintenance.

For the week of 26 December to 1 January 2023, the utility will now be subjecting only 7,537MW of capacity to planned maintenance, compared to 10,806MW in the outlook from Week 46.

That means it will take down 3,269MW less than it had planned — a reduction of 30%.

Schedules

For people living in the major metros, load shedding schedules are available here:

For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.

Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.

THE END.

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