Eskom on Tuesday appeared confident of being able to meet a second day of increased demand as many business open for a second day in 2016.

The utility used its Twittwer account — ?@Eskom–SA — to announce in the morning: “There is no load shedding expected today.”

In a statement‚ Eskom said that “generating capacity (had been) ramped up to meet increased demand”.

“This is as business activities across the country switched back on yesterday (Monday)‚” it said.

 “As a result an increase in demand of nearly 2 000MW was recorded yesterday and this is expected to increase slightly from Wednesday as the new school year starts.”

The parastatal touted the success of its festive season maintenance festival‚ and said it “is progressing well with the maintenance of its power generating plant whilst supplying the country’s electricity needs”.

This‚ it said‚ boded well as it “expects the system to remain stable throughout the rest of the summer period following a rigorous program of planned maintenance over the festive season”.

“Power station units that had been taken offline for maintenance during the festive season in order to take advantage of the low demand of electricity are now being brought back to service in order to meet increasing demand of electricity‚” Eskom said.

“Eskom was able to successfully conduct maintenance on 9000MW of its plant at the peak of the maintenance festival over the December period.

“We are now ramping down our planned maintenance bringing it to levels of between around 5000MW and 3000MW to accommodate increased electricity demand in order to keep to our commitment of maintenance without implementing load shedding.”