Load shedding to last until late on Friday

Eskom has announced that this week’s load shedding, which kicked in on Monday, is set to last until 22h00 this Friday, 4th June 2021.

While the power utility was barely managing to keep the lights on during this work-a-day week (which also happens to be the coldest so far this year) for the most part, Eskom says that more breakdowns in generating units at power stations mean that it’ll have to implement load shedding continuously.

Load shedding until the weekend

“The emergency generation reserves have been used extensively in the past days to avoid loadshedding during the day. This has resulted in these being depleted, reducing available capacity. It is, therefore, necessary to implement loadshedding continuously until Friday night at 22:00 in order to replenish the emergency reserves,” Eskom said in a statement.

“Breakdowns currently total 13 601MW of capacity, while another 1 330MW is unavailable due to planned maintenance. Eskom teams are working hard to return generation units to service, as well as to replenish the emergency reserves”.

On top of that, Eskom has urged South Africans to reduce their electricity usage to help ease the strain on the national grid. Given that the mercury is dropping faster than digested berries from a budgie’s backside, this seems unlikely to happen.

Well, if there is any good news to take from this, at least South Africans have a heads-up two days in advance, rather than the two hours we were used to earlier in the week.