Miraculously, on — probably — the most important day on President Cyril Ramaphosa’s calendar, Eskom announced the end of stage 3 loadshedding.
Eskom ‘miraculously’ reverses loadshedding – No power cuts this week
The power utility sent South Africa into an uproar when it implemented a higher frequency of rotational electricity cuts on Wednesday, warning that “there is a high probability of loadshedding continuing on Thursday.”
It seems that in a span of 20 hours, miracles occurred at Megawatt Park. The power utility doubled-back on its warning and claimed, in a statement released on Thursday that “over the past 24 hours, Eskom teams successfully returned four generation units to service.”
“Another five units are expected to return to service during the next two days. The loadshedding of the past two days has also enabled Eskom to adequately replenish the emergency generation reserves,” the utility said.
In the same breath, though, Eskom warned that the risk of power cuts remains elevated with more than 13 000MW unavailable due to breakdowns.
‘Stage 6 in February is a certainty’ – Ted Blom
This figure, according to energy analyst Ted Blom, is very important to take note of. In a radio interview with SAfm’s Aldrin Sampear, Blom warned that South Africa reaching stage 6 power cuts this month is a certainty.
Blom believes the national electricity provider is not completely honest about the scale of its problems.
“They are telling us they are doing level 2 loadshedding – but that’s for the public. What they don’t tell you is that behind the scenes they are actually loadshedding their VLS, their voluntary loadshedding clients by another 2000 megawatts,” he told CapeTalk recently.
These claims, of course, have been rubbished by Eskom. The power utility maintains that the highest shedding level is stage 4, increasing the frequency of outages 12 times over a four-day period.
