- South Africa’s state owned energy utility, Eskom, has announce that loadshedding will be suspended from 05:00 tomorrow morning.
- The country has experience rolling blackouts due to loadshedding since last Friday.
While the utility is currently able to suspend loadshedding, there are still significant risks to some generating units, which would force Eskom to implement loadshedding at short notice should they lose any further generation capacity.
While Eskom teams have returned some generation units to service since Friday, helping to reduce the pressure on the system, has unfortunately resulted in further breakdowns during the period. “Although we have recovered some emergency generation reserve capacity to support the system, the recovery in generation capacity has not been sufficient to alleviate the system constraints,” the utility said in a statement.
In addition to the Eskom planned maintenance programme, Hydro Cahora Bassa has also started its planned annual maintenance outage on 09 October 2021, which resulted in a 650MW reduction in available capacity. Hydro Cahora Bassa is expected to be at full capacity by Friday morning.
Total breakdowns currently amount to 14 868MW while planned maintenance is 5 277MW of capacity.
“During the night and over the next few days, some generation units will be returning to service, which will further ease the pressure on the system. Returning units are expected at Kriel, Majuba, Hendrina, Lethabo and Tutuka power stations,” the utility concluded.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
