Eskom confirmed in a statement that loadshedding will remain at Stage 5 until Thursday. However, in all likelihood, rotational power outages may persist for the remainder of the week.
Stage 5 loadshedding until Thursday, 22 September 2022
The national power supplier has been grappling with keeping the lights on for the past two weeks.
What started out as Stage 6 loadshedding at the beginning of the week has been reduced to Stage 5 outages, but Eskom warned it was a far way out of the woods.
“Loadshedding will continue to be implemented at Stage 5, with the possibility of reducing one stage by Thursday (22 September 2022). Since yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon four generation units at four power stations were taken offline for emergency repairs. These are a generating unit each at Arnot, Lethabo, Kendal and Majuba power stations,” the statement read.
The state-owned power supplier also confirmed that Stage 5 was a cautionary step “to limit the use of emergency generation reserves.”
“The emergency generation reserves are severely constrained by extensive utilisation to supplement generation capacity,” Eskom explained.
At the time this article was published, Eskom had 4 098MW on planned maintenance, “while another 17 121MW of capacity [was] unavailable due to breakdowns.”
Readers from these metros can check the latest loadshedding schedule below:
- City of Johannesburg
- City of Ekurhuleni
- City of Tshwane
- City of Cape Town
- Nelson Mandela Bay
- eThekwini
- Manguang
- Buffalo City
How much does Eskom spend on diesel?
Under fire chief executive Andre De Ruyter has yet to provide an update on the amount of taxpayers’ money Eskom is using to burn diesel that fuels gas turbines which, along with megawatts coming from independent power producers (IPPs), afford the country emergency energy supply.
The last update was in April 2022, where that month, the national electricity supplier splurged R626 million on diesel. At the time, Eskom’s chief financial officer Calib Cassim had revealed that the power supplier spent an estimated R10 billion on emergency energy in the 2021/2022 financial year, 70% of which was allocated to diesel.