Power utility Eskom says that a reduction in unplanned outages and an improvement in generating capacity will allow it to suspend load shedding briefly overnight, and downgrade the planned stage 2 load shedding to stage 1 on Tuesday.

Owing to the further improvement in available generation capacity with breakdowns significantly reduced to 12,582MW of generation capacity, stage 3 load shedding will be suspended at midnight on Monday until 05h00 on Tuesday.

Thereafter, stage 1 load shedding will resume from 05h00 until 16h00, followed by stage 3 load shedding from 16h00 until 05h00 on Wednesday.

Eskom said it is closely monitoring the system performance and will communicate a further update on Tuesday.

This puts this week off to a better start than last week, where stage 6 load shedding was in effect for most of the time – only being downgraded as the weekend approached.

The relief also comes as Kusile Power Station’s Unit 4 has returned to service bringing back 800 megawatts, which was taken off during the unit’s 20-day planned maintenance.

Minister in the Presidency for Electricity, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said on Sunday that other units at Kusile would be returning sooner than expected, which would put the country on better footing in the last quarter of the year.

Units 1, 2 and 3 of the power station located in Mpumalanga were put offline due to a flue-gas desulphurisation (FGD) mechanism that was damaged in October last year. This affected stacks at the units.

These are now expected to come online between October and the end of November 2023.

“We’ve been able to shed a month on the return of unit 3, and the expectation is that we should be able to return this unit by 14 October. The same is applicable for unit 1. We should be able to get it on 30 October,” he said.

Schedules 

For people living in the major metros, load shedding schedules are available here:

For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.

Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.

Read: Code Red at Eskom