After a week of rolling power cuts, Eskom said the grid is stable.
It hasn’t sent out a warning of blackouts for the week ahead.
The power utility is, however, conducting what it calls load reduction in some provinces, for now.
That involves cutting electricity to areas with too many illegal electricity connections.
Meanwhile, the utility blamed the problem of power cuts on its ageing power plants.
Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha explained how they implement different stages of blackouts.
“What stressed the system we had about 17 units running with faults, we really had to shut down some of them which reduced available capacity to just over 28,000 megawatts at one point and the lowest was just over 26,000 megawatts which were not enough to supply the whole of South Africa without any interruptions, which is why Eskom called Stage 2 load-shedding which reduces demand by 2,000 megawatts,” he said.
“When that did not seem to be enough, because some of the major customers including some municipalities did not respond to the call or rather the implementation instruction from the system operators instruction as required, so we had to escalate that load-shedding to Stage 4 which implies a shortage of 4,000 megawatts.
“So we had to work on that and return generation units to service and we had to pump the emergency generation facilities, which when you have both you get about 3,000 megawatts from those but we have run them so hard that you had to deplete the diesel and you have to stop the engines and fill in the fuel and start again. That is what we went through.’
Source: eNCA
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