Eskom has warned loadshedding might be back this weekend.
This is after more than 310 days of uninterrupted electricity supply.
Last week Friday, the 24th January 2025, Eskom said unplanned outages were at 12, 717 Megawatts (MW) up from the previous year’s 1, 119 MW.
Dan Marokane, Eskom Group Chief Executive, said “this is a potentially temporary setback. Loadshedding is largely behind us due to the structural improvements in our generation fleet. However, over the past seven days, we have experienced several breakdowns that require extended repair times. This has necessitated the use of all our emergency reserves, which now need to be replenished. Consequently, we are closely monitoring the status of our current emergency reserves, and loadshedding up to Stage 4 may be implemented over the weekend.”
Responding to NERSA’s decision of approving 12,7% instead of 36, 1%, Nhlanhla Ngidi, Head of Energy at SALGA, said “we want to congratulate NERSA, I know there’s a lot of work that went into the assessment of the Eskom application, the removal of Eskom unnecessary fat, making sure that while they remove that fat, Eskom will still recover a reasonable return, and also be able to run its operation.
12% is three times less than what Eskom had applied for. We could say the nation has dodged the bullet for now, although a double digit increase in anything-food, electricity or water, is never good, because of inflation right now.
We should give props to NERSA for a job we’ll done…”
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