- South Africa’s state owned power utility, Eskom, has implemented Stage 2 loadshedding overnight – from 16:00 to 05:00am due to higher-than-expected electricity demand, the loss of generation units, and extensive planned maintenance.
- This is the fourth bout of loadshedding over the last three months. Read more
Ongoing planned maintenance continues at 15.41% of generation capacity, marking a 3.8% increase compared to the same period last year. The high level of planned maintenance aims to enhance fleet reliability for the anticipated increased peak winter demand while ensuring compliance with environmental and regulatory requirements. Currently, 8 974MW of the generation capacity is under planned maintenance.
Respected energy analyst Chris Yelland comments, “While EAF remains low at 57% for the last 2 weeks and stubbornly below 60% for the year to date, it is important to note that this is not the full picture. Planned maintenance outages have risen very significantly for the last 6 weeks to the highest levels in 3 years at this time of year, while unplanned outages (generator breakdowns and partial load losses) have dropped over the last 3 weeks to 26%. This, together with 800 MW Kusile Unit 1 and 800 MW Medupi Unit 4 hopefully coming online soon, prepares Eskom well for the winter months of June, July and August”.
The latest Eskom week-on-week energy availability factor EAF for 2025. Data source: Eskom. Image credit: Chris Yelland. Chris is an energy analyst, consultant, electrical engineer, public speaker, writer and MD at EE Business Intelligence (Pty) Ltd. Follow Chris on X – @chrisyelland
Link to Eskom’s real time data portal HERE
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
