Loadshedding risk remains very high
Loadshedding risk remains very high after 5 am on Thursday 14th of October 2021.
“While Eskom is currently able to suspend load-shedding, there are still significant risks to some generating units, which would force Eskom to implement load-shedding at short notice should we lose any further generation capacity.”
Eskom said its teams were” doing everything possible” to manage the risks.
“While Eskom teams have returned some generation units to service since Friday, helping to reduce the pressure on the system, we have unfortunately suffered further breakdowns during the period,” Eskom said.
“Although we have recovered some emergency generation reserve capacity to support the system, the recovery in generation capacity has not been sufficient to alleviate the system constraints,” it warned.
Eskom has not published a weekly system status report since the start of October and its public data portal has not been updated since last Wednesday.
It says there has been a fairly significant failure of the data support system but that this will be resolved soon.
Eskom is currently barely managing to generate 26 000 megawatts (MW) of power to meet peak demand in the evenings.
To avoid Stage 4 load shedding this week, where 4 000MW of demand is removed, it is relying on most of its 14 open cycle gas turbine (OCGT) plants and is cutting supply to its large industrial customers, including South 32’s aluminium smelters near Richards Bay. On Monday, it removed 1 200MW of supply to these customers.
Eskom implemented Stage 2 load shedding from Friday (October 8). At that point, it said this would be until Thursday, October 14, at 5am. However, generating capacity has not improved since then.
Loadshedding Western Cape