For Black Friday, power utility Eskom has given the nation 50% of our electricity supply off, with some areas set to spend more than 12 hours without power this weekend.“It is with great regret that due to the shortage of generating capacity and emergency reserves, stage 6 load shedding will be implemented from 12pm today until 5am on Monday.“Eskom will publish further communication today and continue to closely monitor the power system,” Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena said on Friday morning.

 

 
Load sheddingThe escalation in load shedding follows warnings by Eskom that the grid was under severe constraint.

The parastatal experienced a spike in breakdowns over the past few weeks forcing it to escalate power cuts to stage 4 on Wednesday.

Major disappointment

As Eskom continues its battle to keep the lights on, Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa labelled the performance of the parastatal’s power station in generating electricity over the past two weeks as a “major disappointment”.

Ramokgopa said South Africa experienced frequent load shedding in recent times due to the unplanned capacity loss factor.

This meant generation units were failing at a much faster rate in the weeks preceding the two-week period.

“Part of the deterioration is that we have had a significant failure of a cluster of units at Eskom,” the minister told reporters.

Lack of maintenance

In August, Ramokgopa said Eskom was losing hundreds of thousands of megawatts of electricity due to a lack of consistent maintenance at some of its power stations.

The minister said the historical lack of maintenance of electricity infrastructure resulted in the underperformance of some power stations which could be adding capacity to the electricity grid.