When announcing his energy plan in July, Ramaphosa said the country had an electricity shortage of 6 000MW. Part of his plan included fixing the problems at Eskom and the use of alternative sources of power from independent power producers
The utility was scrambling to keep the lights on Tuesday after three of its generating units at the Kendal power station tripped, while other units at Medupi and Arnot power stations were out due to emergency repairs. By lunchtime on Tuesday, 16 985MW of electricity was offline, while 5 446MW of capacity was out because of planned maintenance, triggering stage 4 load shedding. Stage 4 load shedding means lights are out for at least three hours at a time and twice a day in an area.
I know it’s too much to ask for patience from our people, but at the same time all I can is that the problems are being addressed. “However, should we then have challenges on the available capacity that means we may go into in to load shedding and also implement the necessary reliability maintenance on some of the coal units that they really require it we cannot take them off.”
In the three months to June, South Africa’s economy shrunk to pre-pandemic levels contracting by 0.7% quarter on quarter partly because of load shedding.“Investors understand our challenges. They understand where we are. They are also appreciative of the measures and the steps we are taking on an ongoing basis to repair Eskom.”
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