Pretoria – Power utility Eskom has announced that load shedding, which started on Monday afternoon, will continue across South Africa until the weekend.
“The outlook for the week is that an additional four units – Medupi 3, the one that we lost yesterday, Matimba 5, Matla 5 and Kendon 7 they are all expected to return to service by the weekend,” Eskom chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer told journalists.
He said the unreliability and unpredictability of the power utility’s generators did little to prevent the need for higher stages of load shedding.
“We unfortunately have to inform the public that we will continue with stage 2 load shedding up until 5 o’clock on Saturday morning, the 12th of March,” Oberholzer said.
“We again do apologize, we really apologize for the very difficult situation we are placing the people of South Africa and the negative impact that we fully understand to have on the economy of the country. So we really apologize for that.”
In a statement on Monday afternoon, Eskom announced that it was implementing load shedding in a bid to replenish emergency reserves.
Eskom said since midnight on Sunday, it had lost units at Camden, Kusile, Duvha and Matla power stations. In addition, there had been a delay in the return of units at Kusile and two units at Majuba power stations.
IOL