Load-shedding is expected to continue until Monday at 5pm.

The announcement was made by Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter when giving an update on the power utility's system challenges.

“We’re trying our best to pull that forward but it depends on returning units. We have a total of 12,902 unplanned load losses, which is a slight improvement to numbers we saw yesterday. 

“We will manage the dam levels over the weekend and replenish upper dams for reserve capacity. We’ve managed to improve the stock-holding of our diesel stations," De Ruyter said.

Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer said the goal was to keep dam levels at the same level, adding that it was important so that they did not deteriorate any further. “Slowly but surely, we’ll improve upper dam levels and load-shedding is assisting in doing that. We trust by 5pm on Monday, dams will be full,” he said.

Oberholzer confirmed the Kusile power station had not contributed to generation over the last couple of days due to units being out. “Kusile didn’t contribute over the weekend to any capacity to the grid. We’re dealing with challenges to Unit 1.

“Unit 2 had an outage since November and also Unit 3 is also out. If you take that into consideration, we  didn’t receive any benefit capacity-wise from Kusile,” Oberholzer said.