JOHANNESBURG-South Africa‘s power utility Eskom said will be implementing stage 1 and stage 2 loading-shedding on Friday.
Stage 1 load-shedding will be in effect from 9 am to 12 noon with stage 2 taking over until 11 pm.
According to e NCA Eskom says they have suffered another setback as they have lost additional capacity from Medupi power station.
The power utility says coal and ash handling issues are at the root of the problems today.
#POWERALERT 1
Date: 18 October 2019Stage 2 loadshedding to be maintained for a greater part of today @SABCNewsOnline @News24 @SAgovnews @ewnupdates @Moneyweb @IOL @eNCA @SowetanLIVE @Fin24 @BDliveSA @BusinessLiveSA @TimesLIVE pic.twitter.com/4H5tPeCiBu
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) October 18, 2019
On Thursday, Eskom board chairperson Jabu Mabuza said that the power utility would implement stage one load shedding on Friday and did not foresee the need for further power cuts thereafter.
Medupi was already encountering problems with a broken conveyer belt.
“We have activated our emergency command service centre and system recovery is in progress. Contingency measures were put in place to manually feed coal to Medupi and we have made a considerable amount of progress to have this done by the middle of next week.”
It seems like it’s not only South Africans who are experiencing power difficulties about why Eskom cannot seem to address the problem of load shedding.
While the acting CEO assured the country that they won’t be implementing rolling blackouts this weekend, he could not guarantee how long this would last.
“We have never, we can never ever say that.”
Mabuza said the decision to load shed was one that took them by surprise as well.
“The decision to load shed, including the stage and duration is based on a prognosis that we need to take into account the state of the system and generation capacity at that point in time.” he told Eyewitness News
Eskom’s Dikatso Mothae said: “We have mentioned that the system is volatile and when things unexpectedly happen, we, unfortunately, are in this situation where we said it would be stage 1 load shedding but it will be, for the greater part of the country, be stage 2. We will be reviewing later today and will be in a better position to give you a better prognosis.”
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