• Eskom has announced that loadshedding will be decreased for the weekend.
• Stage 3 will be implemented from Saturday morning and Stage 2 from Sunday afternoon.
• Meanwhile, Eskom says that three of its largest generating units at Kusile power station will only be returned to service in a year’s time.

South Africans are once again headed for a weekend where less heavy loadshedding is promised. This is according to Eskom, who announced that blackouts will be downgraded to Stage 3 on Saturday from 05:00.

In a tweet, Eskom stated that since generation capacity has improved and that weekend demand is usually lower than the rest of the week, loadshedding would be downgraded.

However, it cautioned the public that there is still a high degree of uncertainty associated with its loadshedding implementation which are “dependent on units returning to service as planned.”

As such, the schedule for Friday and this weekend will look like this:

• Friday – Stage 4,
• Saturday – Stage 4 from 00:00 until 05:00, thereafter Stage 3,
• Sunday – Stage 3 until 16:00, thereafter Stage 2.

It is likely that Stage 2 will be ramped up to a higher stage as the week begins and demand increases, maybe even by Sunday evening as has been the norm for the last few weeks.

As per usual, Eskom says it has been dealing with a wide range of breakdowns across its generating units. It was forced to implement Stage 6 cuts on Wednesday due to breakdowns at six of its generating units effectively removing 18 123MW of capacity at the time.

In Thursday’s announcement, Eskom revealed that around 1 599MW of capacity has returned to service, with more expected to return over the weekend.

Thursday also saw a media briefing, covered by SA News, with Eskom board member Mteto Nyati who indicated that some of Eskom’s biggest generating units will remain inoperable at least until next year.

This includes three units at the Kusile power plant and units one and two at the Koeberg nuclear power plant.

Nyati said that the downing of these units has taken around 2 160MW of capacity from the grid and will continue to do so until they are returned.

The timetable for this is definitely on the long-term goal side of things.

“The Kusile 1, 2 and 3 that are unplanned outages… up to now, we’re looking at some of these coming back only about a year from now. It is important that we look at ways and means of accelerating the fixing of these units,” Nyati said.

With that being said, South Africans are set to continue deeper into the year with the most loadshedding ever. So much so that the government is currently mulling over implementing a national state of disaster in order to address the energy crisis at Eskom more quickly.

Critics have said the emergency declaration is not needed yet and will only be abused.

[Image – CC 0 Brett Sayles on Pexels]