South African industry is already starting to wind down for the Christmas holidays, yet Eskom can’t keep the lights on — on a weekend!
The perennially troubled state-owned utility said on Friday night that load shedding would return all weekend, with the first rolling blackouts to commence at 6am on Saturday. The blackouts would be at stage 2, meaning Eskom would 2GW of supply nationally.
The blackouts will run from 6am to 11pm on both Saturday and Sunday, the utility said in a statement. It said it needed to implement the power cuts to replenish depleted emergency generation reserves for the coming week.
“As Eskom ramps up its planned maintenance during the lower-demand summer period, as previously committed, it has had a large number of unforeseen breakdowns from the ageing, unreliable plant over the past few days,” it said.
“In addition to this, Eskom has taken two generation units at the Kendal power station offline in compliance with environmental legislation. Similarly, four generation units at the Camden power station have been taken offline to conserve the integrity of the ash dam facility.”
Almost 18GW of Eskom supply was currently unavailable, 7.5GW of which was out on planned maintenance and 10.2GW unplanned outages. — (c) 2020 NewsCentral Media