By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Arising from the failure of its nuclear power station and coal plants, South Africa’s utility company, Eskom, on Friday announced the resumption of scheduled power cuts expected to last throughout the weekend.
In a statement, Eskom said the loss of power from units at the Koeberg nuclear plant and Kusile coal station left it with a shortage of 2,700 megawatts (MW) of its generation capacity for over 14 hours.
The company said it has begun implementing “Stage 3” outages, which require the shedding of up to 3,000 MW of electricity from the national grid until Monday morning while efforts continue to replenish its emergency reserves.
“Eskom is focused on deploying extra engineering resources to expedite the repair of units currently offline,” it said in the statement, adding that it expected to return 6,200 MW of capacity to service by Monday evening, the peak period for electricity demand.
Power cuts have been recurrent in South Africa for over a decade, reaching an alarming stage in 2023, when outages occurred on more than 300 days throughout the year.
The power cuts stopped in March last year but have continued to occur occasionally since the end of January.
Eskom said on Friday that the country was far from returning to the dark days of 2023.
“South Africa is in no way returning to the levels of loadshedding that we experienced in 2023,” said Bheki Nxumalo, Eskom’s group executive for generation, using the term for power outages.
Eskom implements an incremental loadshedding system, where Stage 1 sees up to 1,000 MW of capacity cut from the grid, while Stage 6—with 6,000 MW is the highest level implemented so far.