Eskom is under big strain: the troubled state-owned electricity monopoly was on Wednesday forced to ramp up daytime load shedding to stage 5 amid further trouble with its generation fleet.
The company said in a social media post at 1.53am on Wednesday that the decision to escalate the cuts from a previously communicated daytime level of stage 4 was due to “insufficient generation capacity and the need to further replenish emergency reserves”.
It will continue to impose stage-6 cuts from 8pm to 5am until at least Saturday morning, it said.
After a period of relatively light load shedding, Eskom plunged South Africa back into stage-6 power cuts late last week amid a heatwave that gripped large parts of the country, fuelling demand for electricity.
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The latest bout of severe load shedding comes amid widespread layoffs across the economy, with companies including ArcelorMittal blaming the need to cut jobs at least in part on the government’s inability to deal with the load shedding crisis. – © 2023 NewsCentral Media