Eskom suspends load-shedding for 9 hours
Eskom has announced that it suspended load-shedding at 08:00 on Sunday. Rotational power cuts will continue from 17:00.
“The [load-shedding] stage will be confirmed during the afternoon,” Eskom said.
The state-owned power utility said it could give South Africa a brief reprieve owing to a sufficient recovery in generating capacity and pumped storage dam levels.
On Friday, Eskom warned there would be more erratic changes in load-shedding as it had run out of diesel to run its open-cycle gas turbine power plants, which form part of its emergency power generation fleet.
It had announced stage 4 load-shedding “until further notice.”
During its State of the System briefing on Tuesday, Eskom said high levels of breakdowns caused it to rely heavily on dam water at its pumped storage schemes and diesel reserves at open-cycle gas turbines.
The state-owned power utility also said the collapse of the flue-gas duct leading out of Kusile power station’s unit 1 had dealt a severe blow to its efforts to improve generating capacity.
Two other units are served by the same chimney damaged by the collapse, and Eskom has delayed the return to service of unit 2 and unit 3 as a precaution.
Unit 4 is the only one currently on load at Kusile, Eskom said.
Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer said their current estimates showed it would take no less than six months to fix Kusile’s flue-gas duct.
Eskom said South Africans should expect prolonged load-shedding over the next six to 12 months.
This was because it was undertaking major capital projects and repairs.
Eskom said this would remove over 2,300MW of generating capacity from the grid — over two stages’ worth.
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