Eskom says it would decrease load shedding throughout the night from Stage 4 to Stage 3 from 16:00 to 05:00 till Monday morning due to diesel supplied by PetroSA this week.
On Wednesday, Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan informed Parliament that the government had instantly made 50 million litres of diesel available to Eskom from the state-owned oil company, PetroSA.
Daytime power cutbacks, however, will stay at Stage 2 from 05:00 to 16:00 everyday until further notice, according to the state-owned power agency.
“Eskom will publish a further update as soon as there are any significant changes,” Eskom said on Thursday.
“The continued implementation of load shedding is mainly due to the high levels of breakdowns and the limited emergency generation reserves.”
According to Eskom, a generating unit at each of the Grootvlei, Kendal, and Tutuka power facilities has been taken down for maintenance since Wednesday afternoon.
In addition, four units of Camden Power Station were taken down to fix a water break on a pipe that feeds auxiliary cooling water, while Hendrina Power Station’s producing unit was restarted.
Three units of Kusile Power Station are offline owing to duct (chimney structure) collapse late in October and will stay offline for a few months till chimney system repairs are completed.
Meanwhile, unit 1 of the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station will continue to operate at a reduced capacity for the next three weeks while the fuel is depleted in preparation for the December 2022 refuelling and maintenance outage.
Eskom said that it presently has 6 000MW on scheduled maintenance, with another 14 160MW unavailable due to breakdowns.
“Load shedding is implemented only as a last resort in view of the shortage of generation capacity and the need to attend to breakdowns.”
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