On Thursday Eskom, the national power utility, announced that it was set to implement load reduction across South Africa to “avoid network overloading in high-density areas.” The announcement comes a week after the utility celebrated over 100 days without loadshedding.

While load reduction has been used by Eskom for many years, usually together with loadshedding, and has been used by companies like City Power in recent months to protect local power infrastructure in Johannesburg from overloading, many South Africans took to social media to allege that Eskom was simply rolling out loadshedding under a different moniker.

Loadshedding vs. load reduction: What are the differences?

At this point, South Africans understand well what loadshedding is.

It is the scheduled blackout of the electricity supply to an area, usually multiple areas, for a specific amount of time. It was rolled out since 2008 to protect the national power grid from overloading due to the demand for electricity being higher than the amount of electricity Eskom can supply.

In the last decade, loadshedding has reached critical levels, topping off in 2023, the year with the most loadshed hours to date. In 2024, the utility says it has managed to tame loadshedding for now, but the grid remains unstable and we shouldn’t really be surprised – though disappointed – if loadshedding were to return.

What is load reduction and how does it differ?

Meanwhile, load reduction is similar to loadshedding, as it affects the electricity supply to areas at scheduled times. Companies like City Power will lighten the blow by saying that the supply will be decreased, but what happens is the same – the power is cut.

“It means reducing the amount of electricity supply to specific areas, to lower the risk of overloading and damage to the regional or localised grid,” explained City Power boss Tshifularo Mashava last month.

Most recently in Johannesburg, the load reduction schedule was almost exactly like loadshedding in Stage 2, but only for certain areas of the city. The only real difference is the localised approach, in that sense it can be broken down as: loadshedding affects national, while load reduction affects local.

But for the person at home without power, they might as well be the same thing.

Load reduction is used most often to protect local infrastructure instead of national infrastructure. The distinction is between local transformers (load reduction) compared to entire power stations (loadshedding).

It is usually implemented in response to overloading systems due to illegal connections. These just so happen to occur mostly in majority black, majority poor areas, which is another cause of concern for South Africans.

“Overloaded transformers as a result of electricity theft presents a serious risk to human life, we only implement load reduction as a very last resort for the shortest periods possible after all other options have been exhausted,” Monde Bala, group executive for Distribution said in a statement earlier this month.

Bala’s statement reads eerily similar to a statement shared by Mashava, “[Load reduction] comes as the utility’s last-ditch effort to protect the network from collapse.”

[Image – Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash]