Cape Town - With the country experiencing high stages of load shedding, Eskom has elaborated on its plans to prepare schedules beyond Stage 8, and has tried to allay fears of a country-wide blackout.
For a few hours on Sunday, South Africans were given a reprieve from the high stages that have been worsening since mid-2022, as load shedding was reduced to Stage 1. Now the higher stages are back in force.
Rotating Stage 4 and Stage 5 load shedding was expected to be experienced this week, but on Monday Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena said due to some recovery in the generation capacity over the past 24 hours, only Stage 4 load shedding would continue.
On Tuesday, Eskom has announced that load shedding will be eased to Stage 3 from 5am on Wednesday morning until 4pm in the afternoon, with Stage 4 set to kick-in on Thursday.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s annual statistics report on power generation in South Africa for 2022 showed it was the first year most of the load shedding was at Stage 4, and so far it looked like this trend was continuing this year.
Experts have warned that Stage 8 could be reached during the high winter demand in the next few months in which there would be load shedding for 12 to 14 hours a day.
Eskom said that lately there had been many enquiries about what would happen during Stage 8.
The utility opted to expand the load shedding framework document to include higher stages to provide certainty that Stage 8 was not the last level before a network collapse.
Eskom said in response to questions from the Cape Argus: “The Eskom system operator requested the load shedding framework to be updated to higher stages purely because at the time of development of the previous version, Stage 8 was used as we did not foresee getting there at the time.”
The utility said higher stages of load shedding (beyond Stage 8) would not mean a country-wide blackout, but rather the same philosophy of the previous stages with controlled matching of demand to supply to ensure network stability.
Meanwhile, the City’s load-shedding protection plans are on track to protect residents from the first four stages of Eskom’s load shedding within three years, and shield its residents from frequent high stages.
Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said “the three-phase procurement for load-shedding protection reached several milestones this month. The largest procurement – a 500MW tender to buy power on the open market – is on track to open on March 29”.