Load shedding suspended ahead of the weekend

Friday, January 8, 2021

Eskom has announced that there will be no power cuts as electricity demand has dropped as the weekend approaches.

“While this is the case, Eskom requests the people of South Africa to continue using electricity sparingly as the system remains vulnerable and unstable,” the power utility said on Friday.

The lower demand for electricity buys Eskom time to continue replenishing emergency generation reserves in preparation for the expected higher demand during the coming week.

“In this period, Eskom will also continue to pursue reliability maintenance as planned and previously communicated. This will continue to put pressure on the generation plant going into the week.”

It said that maintenance is necessary to improve the reliability and performance of the power stations.

Eskom is currently running on 6 060MW of capacity on planned maintenance, while another 13 206MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns and other load losses.

The State-owned-entity’s teams are working hard to return as many of these units to service as soon as possible.

“Eskom will communicate timeously should there be any significant changes to the power system.” – SAnews.gov.za