Cape Town– South Africans were caught off-guard last night when Eskom announced that load shedding would begin – with only 10 minutes notice.
Eskom announced the country would be Stage 2 load shedding from Sunday, 5pm until Tuesday, 10pm.
"Failure of three generation units at Tutuka was due to loss of air compressors, a unit at Majuba was forced shutdown while another unit tripped," Eskom said on Sunday.
It said a unit was forced down due to a steam leak at a unit at Matla power station, while trips at a unit each at Medupi, Kusile and Duvha power stations are being investigated.
Eskom said this represents a loss of 6 044MW over this 24-hour period, bringing the total unplanned capacity lost to 16 118MW.
"Planned maintenance is 4 171MW," Eskom said.
"We urge the public to help us by reducing consumption while Eskom teams are working around the clock to restore as many of these units to service as soon as possible," it said.
The City of Cape Town had enough generation capacity to spare its customers from both stages of load shedding until 10pm.
However, the City said that it would only be able to spare customers from one stage of load shedding today.
City customers don't currently have load-shedding. At 22:00 tonight, City customers will move to Stage 2 load-shedding until 06:00 tomorrow, 17 May. They will then move down to Stage 1 until 22:00 tomorrow evening.
— City of Cape Town (@CityofCT) May 16, 2021
Further updates will follow. #CTInfo pic.twitter.com/nmmD1gZQsv
The City and the Western Cape government are in a big push to get municipalities off relying on Eskom.
The municipalities are participating in the Western Cape’s project to move off the national power grid and beat load shedding as part of the municipal energy resilience (MER) project.
The six candidate municipalities participating in the MER project in this financial year are:
- Drakenstein Municipality.
- Mossel Bay Municipality.
- Overstrand Municipality.
- Saldanha Bay Municipality.
- Stellenbosch Municipality.
- Swartland Municipality.
Finance and Economic Opportunities MEC David Maynier highlighted that they are also collaborating with the City of Cape Town on the municipal energy resilience project.