Eskom blames four-hour load shedding on municipalities and Zambia blackout
“Some municipalities have not played their role in implementing load shedding. During stage 2 we saw a number of municipalities either not abiding to load shedding or implementing it on a fractional basis of what their commitment should be.”De Ruyter said that this has triggered Eskom to deepen the rolling blackouts to stage 4 in order to recoup approximately 2 000MW, which was originally targeted during stage 2 blackouts.
“We have engaged with those municipalities and we obviously know who they are. We are very grateful to those municipalities such as eThekwini who were compliant and cooperative from the word go,” he said.The Eskom boss said that the utility intended to reduce load shedding to stage 3 from Wednesday morning at 5am until Friday. Stage 2 will then be implemented at 5am on Saturday, after which load shedding is expected to be lifted.
We were forced to swing a number of generators into action as part of the system design. We had to use expensive gas turbines, even though the situation was resolved in two hours.According to energy policy researcher at the Institute of Economic Justice Brian Kamanzi, Eskom has not been transparent with the severity of the overload in the power stations.
“The issue is that Eskom has not effectively communicated the severity of the crisis. It is true that the municipalities are not doing their part, but what we are not hearing is the power utility taking accountability for the poor levels of its fleet. I think the response from municipalities is due to Eskom downplaying the situation,” he said.
“Eskom had stated we have a shortfall of four to six gigawatts of generation capacity and a number of projects are already in the pipeline, with some hopefully coming online within the next year to 18 months. Until then, we will be operating at the margins, which means when unplanned trips occur at the existing plants, we will unfortunately continue to face load shedding,” he said.
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