The power grid was constrained but stable on Monday after a spike in electricity usage as people returned from holiday, Eskom said.
“We are seeing a lot of demand, but we are able to supply. The risk of load shedding is low to medium,” spokesman Khulu Phasiwe said.
“If things continue to go as they are, we are likely to go through this week without load shedding. We ask people to use electricity sparingly.”
He said there had been an average daily electricity demand of 25GW since the start of the holidays, but this had now risen to 30GW.
On 29 December, the capacity available to meet the evening’s peak demand was 30,1GW (including open cycle gas turbines) with demand of 26,3GW forecast.
Eskom said it expected 5,8GW of outages because of planned maintenance and 8GW of unplanned outages.
It called on people to reduce power use by 10% during the day to help it conduct planned maintenance.
On 5 December, Eskom implemented stage three blackouts.
Stage one allows for up to 1GW of the national load to be shed, stage two for up to 2GW and stage three for up to 4GW.
On 8 December, Eskom CEO Tshediso Matona denied that Eskom was in crisis. — Sapa