Good news for load-shedding from Monday

3 years ago 1

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Eskom has announced it will implement stage 1 load-shedding from early next week.

The utility initially planned to resume stage 2 load-shedding at 05:00 on Monday, 26 December 2022, after suspending the rotational outages for most of Christmas Day.

It then planned to increase to stage 3 power cuts from 16:00 on Tuesday, 27 December 2022.

But due to lower demand for electricity during the day, Eskom said that only stage 1 load-shedding would be necessary from 05:00 on Monday.

The utility said the lower demand meant it relied less on emergency generation reserves.

Eskom said stage 1 would continue until further notice and appealed to South Africans to continue using electricity sparingly.

Despite Eskom managing to suspend load-shedding for most of Christmas Day, stage 3 load-shedding was implemented between midnight and 05:00.

That makes it the first time ever that the utility had the rotational power cuts in effect on Christmas Day.

In previous years, Eskom had been able to avoid implementing load-shedding during the entire week of Christmas and most of the festive season due to much lower power demand.

But the utility’s power plants have recorded their worst performance on record in the past few weeks.

According to energy expert Chris Yelland, week 50 of 2022 saw Eskom’s energy availability factor across all stations drop to 50.73%.

That means that its power plants were only delivering slightly above half their maximum potential capacity, due to substantially high levels of breakdowns.

The need to continue with load-shedding during weeks that have historically had much lower demand also comes despite Eskom significantly reducing the scheduled maintenance it had initially planned to conduct during the period.