Debt-laden power utility Eskom is extending power cuts into Monday after delays in restarting some key generation units.
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Residents and businesses in Johannesburg may soon find load-shedding times reduced from the current four-hour blocks, to the two-hour blocks imposed elsewhere in South Africa.
Eskom will implement rotational national blackouts, starting at midday on Thursday and running through Friday and the entire weekend.
Load shedding will be back, at stage 2, from 10pm on Wednesday, 6 January, Eskom has announced. The power cuts will be repeated on Thursday.
Eskom has taken Unit One of Koeberg offline earlier than planned for scheduled maintenance, exarcerbating the risk of regulator load shedding in the months ahead.
Eskom was scheduled to implement stage-2 load shedding from 10pm on Tuesday, despite many industries being closed for the year-end holidays and the tightened lockdown restrictions.
Eskom is broke and can’t invest in any further capacity. Independent power producers will have to do it, and they will need an independent transmission and market operator that they trust.
Eskom is headed for another full-year a loss as fundamental problems remain even after making a profit of R83-million in the first half of its fiscal year.
South African industry is already starting to wind down for the Christmas holidays, yet Eskom can’t keep the lights on — on a weekend!
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