Eskom hits 100 full days of load-shedding
South Africa has endured over 2,400 hours — or 100 full days — of load-shedding since the start of 2022, popular load-shedding app EskomSePush has revealed.
The country breached the number at 07:00 AM on Friday, 28 October 2022, the 301st day of the year.
That means load-shedding has been in effect for around a third of the time in 2022.
The unpleasant record is also more than twice as long as load-shedding in 2021, which had 1,153 hours or 48 days of rotational power cuts.
Load-shedding is set to continue until at least Sunday, 28 October 2022, which means this year’s tally is expected to reach triple the load-shedding of 2020, when Eskom had 844 hours (or 35 days) of power cuts.
There are still two months to go in the year, and Eskom’s summer load-shedding forecast looks bleak, so the year’s total load-shedding stats are poised to look even worse.
The graph below from EskomSePush compares the hours and days of load-shedding between 2015 and 2022.
Many South Africans might feel that load-shedding was implemented even more frequently than a third of the year.
That could be because the load-shedding stages in 2022 have been far more severe than before.
Due to the higher stages of load-shedding, outages have lasted longer and occurred more frequently.
In 2021, load-shedding only went up to stage 4, and the higher stages accounted for a small fraction of the total hours of load-shedding.
This year, load-shedding has gone up to stage 6 on two occasions, and stage 5 has been implemented for about as long as stage 3 and stage 4 combined in 2020.
Meanwhile, stage 4 power cuts ran about as often as stage 2 in 2022, while there has also been far more stage 3 load-shedding this year than in previous years.
Bloomberg reported last month that South Africa had already suffered 100 days of load-shedding by mid-September.
That figure included any day Eskom implemented load-shedding, even for a few hours during peak periods.
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