There is a low risk of load shedding being implemented over the weekend due to generators performing at their optimum, Eskom said on Friday.
“Our projection shows that we will not have to implement load shedding over the weekend,” spokesman Khulu Phasiwe said.
The demand for electricity during weekends was usually low.
“The risk of load shedding is low to medium, because we do have some generators working optimally at this moment,” he said.
There may be a need to implement load shedding if Eskom experienced any technical breakdowns.
President Jacob Zuma announced on Thursday during the state-of-the-nation address in Parliament that Eskom would be given R23bn to stabilise its finances.
On Monday morning, at a breakfast meeting in Cape Town, he added that he was concerned about shortcomings in the running of the power grid and said government wanted to establish whether this was due to negligence.
“You can’t have one power station collapsing after the other because they are not serviced; where were the people who are working there? What were they doing?”
The president described Eskom’s situation as a “challenge”, not a crisis.
He again blamed the scheduled blackouts, in part, on the apartheid regime’s failure to expand the electricity supplier’s capacity.
“If you look at energy, energy has a history in this country, it has never been enough. It was believed to be because the powers that be at the time said ‘we have enough’.
“So the demand has just rocketed after 1994, and therefore undermined the capacity we have,” he said. — Sapa
