Johannesburg - Eskom has has again broken its promise that the country will not experience rolling blackouts until next week.
In December, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that Eskom had assured him that the festive season would be free of load shedding until January 13.
Despite the promise, the power utility on Thursday announced they would be instituting Stage 2 load shedding until Friday. This is the first load shedding cycle under the new chief executive Andre de Ruyter, who started his job this month after the power utility had been without a leader since July.
In a statement, Eskom said the “system remains severely constrained and unpredictable”.
The latest load shedding comes after a short reprieve from December when the country experienced Stage 6 load shedding for the first time.
Eskom said it lost additional generation capacity overnight with breakdowns of over 14000MW. It said the emergency reserves were also insufficient to meet the demand for electricity.
If Eskom loses capacity above 9500MW, the power utility has to resort to emergency power generation. If that fails, load shedding will have to be implemented.
“As a result we have to load shed throughout the day until today. We will give South Africans regular updates about our prognosis for tomorrow and our recovery efforts for the rest of the week leading into the weekend,” Eskom said in a statement.
It said its team was working hard to return back to normal but it was hard because of inadequate maintenance over the years.
Speaking at the ANC January 8 celebrations in the Northern Cape, Deputy President David Mabuza said Eskom would not be able to solve the issue until maintenance work is done.
“It has misled the president, the day we went there with the president, I insisted on maintenance. Maintenance of these power stations is very important,” Mabuza said.