• Eskom suspended Stage 5 loadshedding just after 10:00 on Thursday morning.
• At 16:00 loadshedding with move to Stage 4 and then at 20:00 Stage 5 will come into effect.
• The utility said it would communicate further this afternoon.

This week Stage 6 loadshedding made an unwelcome return between 20:00 and 05:00 with Stage 5 in effect from 05:00 until 20:00. Now there have seemingly been some improvements in generation capacity, but not a lot.

This morning EskomSePush announced that loadshedding had been downgraded to Stage 3 but it was still waiting for confirmation. Shortly after this push notification, Eskom itself confirmed this.

While Stage 3 is now in effect, this lower level of powercuts isn’t going to remain in place for all that long.

At 16:00 on Thursday, loadshedding will move to Stage 4 until 20:00 when Stage 5 will return. The utility says it will communicate further later today.

We are curious to see if Eskom manages to keep the wheels on and if this schedule persists.

On Wednesday evening Eskom reported that it had 27 443MW of available capacity but there was a demand of 28 430MW. That means there was only 987MW short on Eskom’s part but it shed 4 912MW. In its report, Eskom noted that no open-cycle gas turbines were used and 1 934MW of its energy was coming from renewable sources.

While there was a minimal shortfall, it’s important to note that Eskom has spent the week building up its emergency reserves and as such, likely needed to implement higher levels of loadshedding to account for this.

With that in mind, let’s hope this stockpiling is effective and means that December sees less frequent outages.

As of this morning, unplanned outages mean 13 706MW of capacity is unavailable while planned outages mean 6 061MW of capacity is unavailable.