JOHANNESBURG - Impala Platinum yesterday said that it had lost R120million in revenue at its Rustenburg and Marula operations as a result of load shedding.
Spokesperson Johan Theron said the group lost R100m at Impala Rustenburg operations and R20m at the Marula mines when the country was plunged into darkness due to Stage 6 load shedding on Monday.
“The total impact on revenue will be more, because days leading up to Stage 6 load shedding our mines were not operating at 100percent capacity,” Theron said, adding that the group would give a detailed account of the losses when it releases its financial results next year. He said the mines were operating below capacity yesterday after Eskom implemented Stage 2 rotational load shedding until 11pm last night as a result of a shortage of capacity. Eskom reduced load shedding to Stage 2 from Stage 4 yesterday after several units being returned to service and localised flooding at its power stations subsided.
On Tuesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa cut his working visit to Egypt short as the country plunged into darkness, sending shock waves across South Africa’s ailing economy.
Harmony Gold also announced the resumption of shifts at its nine South African underground mines from the start of yesterday’s afternoon shift.
“Monday’s night shift and yesterday’s day shift at all the company’s underground mines were cancelled in response to an urgent request from power utility Eskom for power usage to be reduced immediately to levels required only for the maintenance of essential services. Eskom’s request followed its announcement on Monday of an emergency shift to Level 6 load shedding,” said Harmony.
Sibanye-Stillwater spokesperson James Wellsted said that the impact of load shedding on operations was not limited to the Stage 6 curtailment period alone.
“We are still under Stage 2 as far as I know, so we haven’t quantified the impact yet, and will most likely only do so at our year-end results in February,” Wellsted said.
Merafe Resources said on Tuesday that ongoing power cuts and the economic environment would hurt the future of some of the company’s operations and the wider ferro-alloys sector in South Africa.
Diamond producer Petra Diamonds operations resumed on Tuesday and were running at a 20percent load curtailment, in line with requirements.
“Petra is used to managing the operations optimally to maintain production levels as much as possible throughout load shedding requests. Such measures include the bringing forward of essential maintenance work and restricting load curtailment to processing plants where possible, given the company’s operations have excess processing capacity which allows for additional throughput when full power is restored,” the company said.
It said, however, that the impact of the current load shedding would depend on the duration and level of severity of the power restrictions.