It looks as though South Africans might see some relief from load shedding this weekend. Eskom has announced that the stages experienced will scale back over the weekend. We’re on Stage 5. By early Sunday morning, the country should be at Stage 3.
That’s the plan, anyway. Stage 5 is expected to stick around until 05:00 on Saturday morning, after which it’s Stage 4 until 05:00 on Sunday morning. That’s planned until 05:00 on Monday morning. After that… who knows?
It’s a Stage they’re going through
Loadshedding will continue to be implemented at Stage 5 until Saturday morning, thereafter,
Stages 4 and 3 will be implemented until 05:00 on Monday pic.twitter.com/OARWUNMgw2— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) September 23, 2022
Signs point towards next week being Stage 3 throughout but with load shedding it’s best not to think too far ahead. The reduction over the weekend is so that Eskom can replenish pumped storage dam levels. But we’re not out of the woods yet.
Several units were taken out of service for maintenance, while three that were down have come back into operation. Even if more return, Eskom will continue load shedding. Turns out, we’ve burned through loads of emergency reserves and those must be put back.
Speaking of burning through things, there may also be diesel issues at two of Eskom’s gas turbines. These two turbines account for 2,000MW of capacity. If the company can’t secure fuel, we can expect the load shedding level to climb instead of dropping. So… have a great weekend, we guess?