JOHANNESBURG: Eskom hopes to keep the lights on for Christmas.
“The power system is expected to remain constrained but stable this week and the rest of the festive season, and the risk of load shedding is low during this period,” said Eskom yesterday.
“However, the system remains vulnerable… Any extra load or faults may necessitate the need to implement load shedding.”
Eskom is running maintenance on the grid while the business industry is closed for the holidays. Nearly 13 200MW was offline yesterday – about 30 percent of the full grid.
More than half of the outages were due to breakdowns and the rest due to planned maintenance.
More capacity is expected to be taken offline over the next few days, but Eskom also expects demand to drop from today to about 25 125MW on Christmas Day, and remain low for the rest of the weekend. – Own Correspondent