Eskom announces stage 2 loadshedding

Eskom has warned South Africa of stage two loadshedding, which would take effect from 9am this morning.

This comes, according to a brief tweet released by the power utility on Wednesday morning, as a result of “shortage of capacity” and is expected to last until 11pm.

Last month Eskom assured the public that it would avoid loadshedding during the summer months, but warned of occasional outages as a result of plant maintenance.

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“Most of our power stations are in need of maintenance to improve reliability... we do our best to strike the right balance between plant maintenance and keeping the lights on,” said Eskom chairperson and acting CEO Jabu Mabuza last month.

A mounting debt of R450 billion has almost crippled the state-owned enterprise and, as a result, Eskom has instituted a nine-point “recovery plan” to keep the lights on, including fixing coal stock piles issues and addressing challenges at new plants.

In July Finance Minister Tito Mboweni announced a R59 billion bailout for Eskom from government.

In March, the last time the country experienced loadshedding, Minister of Public Enterprises Pravin Gordhan said the loadshedding which took place formed part of necessary planned outages.

The outages were as a result of a cyclone in Mozambique, which affected power imports from the country. The power utility also didn’t have enough diesel to power its open cycle gas turbines, which resulted in power outages.

City Power also tweeted out that while loadshedding was not confirmed, it would be instituting planned power outages on October 20 and 21, with areas affected including Roodepoort, Berea and Hillbrow.