South Africans are getting a brief reprieve over their power woes today (19th May 2021) as Eskom has announced it plans to suspend load shedding until 5pm this evening.
After that, if you’re unfortunate enough to be on the list of suburbs still affected, you may be in the dark, because the parastatal will then reimplement the planned Stage 2 outages until 11pm – as it announced it would on Sunday.
Eskom flicks the switch
There’s a statement released on the power utility’s Twitter account (that would be its social media team rather than the utility itself), that says its technicians have returned seven generators to service over the last 24 hours.
Eskom suspends loadshedding from 04:00 as generators return to service, however, the system remains vulnerable and stage 2 loadshedding will resume at 17:00 until 22:00 tonight@News24 @SABCNews @NewzroomAfrika @eNCA @IOL @ewnupdates @SundayTimesZA @SowetanLIVE pic.twitter.com/3n9CbYrYcV
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) May 18, 2021
“This has helped easer the supply constraints and enabled Eskom to suspend loadshedding (sic) at this point,” the utility said. “However, this is currently insufficient to fully supply the evening peak.”
The statement goes onto to say that South Africans can expect the rest of the week to improve as teams work to bring more units online. That having been said, it stopped short of confirming this, warning that there are no guarantees because the system remained vulnerable.
Still, a reprieve is a reprieve, isn’t it? At this stage, we’ll take our wins where we can get them.
