The respite from loadshedding offered at the weekend appears to have been short lived after an outage at Kriel Power Station.
In a power alert issued this morning, Eskom announced that loadshedding might be on the cards after 2 000MW of capacity was removed from the grid.
“During the early hours of this morning there were two electrical faults in quick succession in the high voltage yard at Kriel Power Station. The fault, which appears to be related to the heavy mist conditions experienced at the time, is under investigation,” Eskom wrote.
Yes, you read that correctly, heavy mist appears to have caused electrical faults at Kriel Power Station. This sounds like one of “the coal is wet” excuses but there have been reports in the past of heavy mists in India causing power lines to trip. With that having been said, that report was filed in 2012 and it suggested that dense fog and heavy pollution were to blame.
As a result of the outage at Kriel power station, five generating units are offline removing over 2 000MW of capacity from the electrical grid.
“While some generation units at other power stations are expected to return to service during the day, these will take time to load to full capacity. There there be any further loss of generation capacity during the day, or some units fail to return to service as anticipated, loadshedding may be required to be implemented at short notice,” Eskom warned.
As always, with the risk of loadshedding about, we advise downloading the EskomSePush mobile app on iOS or Android devices in order to stay up to date on what is happening in the country and your suburb when it comes to power supply.
Electrical faults tripped five generating units at Kriel Power Station this morning, removing
2 000MW from the system. Loadshedding may be implemented at short notice should further
capacity losses occur pic.twitter.com/iyU8DsNWyN— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) July 25, 2022
