Eskom has given South Africa some good news for the Christmas period. The power utility has announced changes to its Christmas maintenance schedules, set to greatly reduce load shedding over the holidays. It’s not quite the same as literally saving Santa Claus, but it’s the best Eskom can do.
And if you’re crying about us spoiling the ending of The Nightmare Before Christmas – keep it to yourself.
The twelve stages of Christmas
Of course, we still need to remain prepared for the eventuality that we’ll experience load shedding at some stage over the period. Before making changes to its yearly planned maintenance schedule, the country was set to face 8,956MW of planned maintenance in the week of 19-25 December. The following week, 26 – 1 January was set to take 10,806MW down for planned maintenance.
That was before Eskom altered its schedule. The first week mentioned above is now only facing 6,641MW of planned maintenance. That’s a 26% reduction. The second week has been reduced to 7,537MW of planned maintenance – a 31% difference (in our favour).
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If Eskom’s outage goals hold true for the month, it looks like the country will only be 1,000MW short over Christmas. As long as no major changes affect the schedule, Eskom feels confident there should be enough to meet demands until the New Year.
Whether this means the weeks leading up to and following the holiday season will take a hit, we can’t be sure. As it stands, Eskom has drastically lowered the planned maintenance averages for January, February and March. We’re not sure why – but we’re not holding our thumbs.
Source: MyBroadband