Load-shedding will be officially suspended in the early hours of Thursday, Eskom has confirmed.

This lived up to its previous commitment, made when stage 2 rotational power cuts were implemented. 

“As previously communicated, Eskom is pleased to announce that load-shedding will be suspended from 5am tomorrow [Thursday]. We have used the past six days of load-shedding to conduct some repairs to generating units and to continue with the maintenance programme.

“Even though we were able to replenish emergency generation reserves, we have had to continue relying on these to support the power system over this period,” said Eskom on Wednesday. 

It said there were still significant risks to some generating units, which would force it to implement load-shedding at short notice should it lose any further generation capacity.

“In addition to the Eskom planned maintenance programme, Hydro Cahora Bassa started its planned annual maintenance outage on October 9, 2021, which resulted in a 650MW reduction in available capacity. Hydro Cahora Bassa is expected to be at full capacity by Friday morning.

“Total breakdowns now amount to 14,868MW while planned maintenance is 5,277MW of capacity,” said Eskom.

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