Eskom plans to suspend rolling power cuts on Thursday evening as some of its generating units return to service, CEO Andre dé Ruyter said.
The company, which supplies almost 90% of South Africa’s electricity, on Wednesday resumed rolling power cuts at stage 2, which requires 2GW to be shed from the national grid.
De Ruyter told journalists on Thursday that a number of generating units that had broken down had been returned to service, and Eskom was working to fix more.
“Our intent at this point in time is that we will lift load shedding tonight at 9pm to give everybody a little bit of respite during the evening hours,” De Ruyter said.
“We will, however, resume load shedding at stage 1 by 5am tomorrow morning, which is expected to continue until 9pm on Friday evening,” he said, adding the suspension of power cuts was subject to more units returning to service.
Eskom has in recent week ramped up outages in response to multiple faults at its coal-fired generation fleet.
Eskom’s current leadership partly blames repeated breakdowns at its coal units on a decision by previous management to defer crucial mid-life repairs. — (c) 2021 Reuters