Cape Town - South Africa was feeling the strain in the wake of half of Koeberg power station’s capacity going offline over the weekend as load shedding hit on Tuesday.
Eskom announced on Tuesday afternoon that it would have to begin Stage 1 load shedding when it became clear they would not be able to meet demand.
The failure of Koeberg’s Unit 1 was made worse when a generator at Tutuka Power Station went out last week.
The power provider said the blackouts were “due to a shortage of generation capacity as several units are currently on unplanned outages due to technical faults”.
Duvha power plant’s Unit 6 is also out of commission as technicians conduct urgent repairs on the generator.
The power provider had planned to implement load shedding on Tuesday morning, but South Africans – heeding the call to cut down on power usage – were able to prevent nationwide blackouts by lessening the load on the national grid.
However, by Tuesday afternoon, Eskom said the demand on the grid was far too high and it would have to begin rolling out blackouts across the country.
On Tuesday night Eskom said: “The power system remains constrained and will remain so for the rest of this summer. Any extra load or faults in the system may necessitate the need to go into load shedding. We therefore urge all electricity customers to reduce their consumption in order to reduce the severity of load shedding.”
In Blackheath, residents were hit by blackouts throughout the day after vandals damaged three substations in the area.
In its systems services bulletin, Eskom wrote that it would most likely fail to meet power demands this week, falling at least 1 000MW short of the forecasted demand for Wednesday and Thursday. Koeberg’s Unit 1 generates around 930 MW and is set to be online by the weekend.
However, it will be taken down again for maintenance on Monday and will only be online again in May.
The power provider said that it most likely would not have to conduct load shedding over the weekend.
Cape Argus