Load shedding will be back, at stage 2, from 10pm on Wednesday, 6 January, Eskom has announced. The electricity interruptions will be repeated on Thursday during the same overnight hours.

The rotational national power cuts will be implemented until 5am on Thursday, the state-owned power monopoly said in a statement posted on social media. They come on top of similar load shedding last week, which also took place over two consecutive nights.

“The load shedding is necessary to recover and preserve the emergency generation reserves that have been utilised to support the system during the week following the earlier-than-planned shutdown of Koeberg Unit 1 and other units whose return to service has been delayed,” the utility said.

Read: Load shedding: Difficult few months lie ahead for South Africa

Eskom said it has 6.7GW of capacity on planned maintenance and other 12.1GW out on unplanned maintenance.

“Eskom continues to implement reliability maintenance during this period, and thus the system will continue to be constrained and the risk of load shedding remains elevated. At the moment, the equivalent of two large power stations is out for planned maintenance, adding pressure to the system.” — © 2020 NewsCentral Media