• Eskom suffered multiple breakdowns on Saturday and Sunday that returned the country to Stage 6 blackouts despite the utility announcing reduced levels thanks to reduced demand.
• The utility was forced to implement higher and higher stages of loadshedding as its fleet performed poorer and poorer as the weekend progressed.
• This culminated in 23 857MW of capacity lost on Sunday, plunging South Africa into Stage 6 blackouts until further notice.

The weekend began with the promise of a lighter schedule of rolling blackouts for South Africans. Eskom could not keep this promise, and as the weekend deepened, with higher stages of loadshedding implemented as the utility suffered at least eight breakdowns across its generating units in a matter of hours.

Initially, on Friday afternoon Eskom declared rotating Stage 5, 4 and 3 loadshedding at different hours of the day. Lower demand over the weekend would bring power cuts down to Stages 3 and 4 which would return to Stage 5 on Monday. Or at least, that was the hope.

At 2:53 AM on Saturday morning, Eskom announced that it suffered an undisclosed number of breakdowns of generating units in its fleet of power stations, Stage 3 was now off the table, and South Africans would be stuck with only Stage 4 loadshedding from Saturday to Sunday.

A few hours later at 13:44 PM, Eskom hastily announced that it suffered five breakdowns across its fleet. Now, Stage 4 loadshedding would be replaced by Stage 5 only – this meant that Saturday evening brought an additional four-hour loadshedding slot to many areas across the republic.

This time Eskom’s announcement detailed exactly what units had broken down, including three from the new Medupi Power Station, and two from the Duvha Power Station. It had returned three of these five units to operations that same day, but since two others were down, it had to rely on its generation reserves.

“Three of these units have since been returned to service today. However, Eskom has had to rely extensively on emergency reserves which now need to be replenished before Monday,” the utility explained in a tweet.

This meant that Stage 5 would be maintained indefinitely, at least until Sunday afternoon when the utility had even more bad news for its customers.

“Due to the failure of additional generating units and the delay of several units to return to service, Stage 6 loadshedding will be implemented at 16:00 this afternoon until further notice,” Eskom announced.

“This is anticipated to persist through the week.” it added.

Eskom was at Stage 6 leading into the weekend, and it seems that the weekend’s reduced demand (around 29 000MW) did little to aid the languishing utility in righting some of its wrongs in time for the new week.

At the time, Eskom’s Tweet explained that breakdowns across the grid had removed a whopping 19 333MW of electricity, with a further 4 524MW removed due to planned maintenance. This means that Sunday ended with around 23 857MW less power.

Units were offline across Majuba, Medupi, Tutuka, Arnot, Camden, Hendrina, and Matla power stations.

Stage 6 is still implemented as of the time of writing and is set to continue until further notice. The South African government recently announced that it would be deploying 800 members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to protect Eskom’s infrastructure from vandalism.

All to stave off higher levels of blackouts. Meanwhile, it is shaping up to be South Africa’s worst year for loadshedding as it continues unabated.

[Image – Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash]