UPDATE: Eskom has taken things down a notch, switching between Stage 4 and Stage 2 for the next few days.
#LoadsheddingUpdate#stage4 loadshedding (instead of Stage 5) will be implemented continuously until 05:00 on Tuesday morning. Thereafter Stage 2 loadshedding will be implemented daily at 05:00 – 16:00. Stage 4 will be implemented daily at 16:00 – 05:00 until further notice.
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) November 21, 2022
ORIGINAL STORY: Perhaps you take the weekend off from social media or maybe you expected Twitter to stop working over the weekend. Either way, you might have missed that load shedding is back, after a brief Sunday respite. It came back last night with a vengeance at Stage 4, but much of the coming week is even rougher.
Eskom has announced that load shedding continues at Stage 4, until this evening. Then, Stage 5 kicks in from 16:00 to midnight, before dropping back to Stage 4 again. After that, it gets complicated.
Stage 5 of load shedding is acceptance
#POWERALERT1#Stage4 loadshedding will be implemented at 17:00 this afternoon until 16:00 on Monday. Various stages of loadshedding will be implemented during the week pic.twitter.com/UlfcFPBYlx
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) November 20, 2022
From today until Wednesday (at the very soonest), South Africa will operate under four stages of load shedding. From 05:00 to 16:00 on Tuesday, the country will experience Stage 3. From 16:00 to midnight, it’s Stage 5 again. From midnight to 05:00 on Wednesday morning, it’s Stage 4. Then, from 05:00 to 16:00 it’s Stage 2. Cue returns for Stage 5 and then Stage 4, by which time Eskom will have decided just how little power your home is getting for the rest of the week.
There are several reasons why load shedding has returned to South Africa quite as hard as it has. A lack of diesel and the funds required to buy more are part of it. Frankly, it’s amazing the country took this long to reach this point. The inability to run diesel generators as backup is exacerbating the usual run of problems.
Kusile power plant is still stuffed and will remain that way for months. Koeburg’s Unit One isn’t working at full capacity. Arnot, Grootvlei, and Majuba stations each have a unit out of action, but Eskom planned those particular outages.