The headline should have told you everything you need to know — Eskom load shedding is sticking around for the rest of the week. The State-owned power utility is having trouble keeping the lights on during the current cold snap.
Eskom is continuing its trend of not load shedding during the day if it can help it. Can’t have you sitting around doing nothing on company time, after all. That just won’t do — there’s capitalism in thar hills, and you’ve been nominated to dig it out. Then, you can go home and sit in the darkness. Everybody… wins?
What a load of load shedding
Due to the continued shortage of generation capacity, Stage 2 loadshedding will be implemented from 17:00 until 22:00 throughout the week. pic.twitter.com/E40GBxaAjs
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) May 22, 2022
Stage 2 load shedding will remain in effect from 17h00 to 22h00 every evening this week. This isn’t set in stone, however. It’s quite possible that the times for outages will shift to daylight hours, or that the stage of the shed will increase. Eskom can’t rule anything out at this point, except this problem going away any time soon. That’s the one thing that won’t take place.
In total, South Africa lacked about 18,000MW of generation capacity. Around 3,000MW of this is for maintenance. The other 15,000MW is “unplanned”. Currently, the utility is blaming acts of sabotage at power stations around the country for the outage, among other problems. Then there’s the fact that SA’s newest power stations, which went massively over budget, were basically flawed from the very start. That’s not helping either.
Still, at least you can work most days without experiencing power outages, right?