Eskom has announced that load shedding will be pushed to stage 4 on Tuesday.
The power utility said that a sudden tripping of three Kendal Power Station units – totalling 1,920MW maximum generating capacity – has forced the higher stage.
Stage 4 load shedding will start at 10h00 on Tuesday (13 September) and will continue until 05h00 on Thursday (15 September), it said.
Speaking to the media on Monday (12 September), Eskom chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer said that the Eskom grid is extremely vulnerable to breakdowns and that any load shedding schedules are subject to change at short notice.
The COO said that Eskom intends to ramp up maintenance in the coming summer months, which could lead to sporadic load shedding. He added that maintenance remains a big issue for the group, as it is not seeing the outcomes it expected.
He said that as soon as some units are returned to operation following maintenance, they break down again soon after. He attributed the maintenance problems to a lack of appropriate skills and experience needed to address the issues.
Eskom is facing maintenance issues with milling plants, high-pressure valves, cooling water systems, conveyors, and water treatment plans – among others.
Oberholzer said that Eskom desperately needs new capacity to be added to the grid so that it can conduct critical maintenance on its stations. There is no capacity for the utility to take off as many units as it needs to do the necessary maintenance, so there are many units that are operating with known defects, the group said.
The group recently published its load shedding outlook for the rest of the year, noting that it has to keep unplanned outages below 13,000MW to minimise rolling blackouts.
In a more load shedding-heavy scenario, if outages remain above 14,500MW, stage 2 load shedding will be frequent for the foreseeable future. If the power utility is unable to keep outages under 16,000MW, load shedding at higher stages becomes the standard.
Schedules
For people living in the major metros, load shedding schedules are available here:
For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.
Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.
Read: Perfect storm brewing for South Africa as load shedding intensifies
