Eskom issues urgent warning of load shedding at short notice

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Power utility Eskom issued an urgent alert regarding a high risk of load shedding at short notice on Monday evening due to several generation unit breakdowns.

Over the past 12 hours, six generation units have been taken offline, placing severe strain on the power system and requiring the use of emergency reserves.

If an additional 800MW is lost, Eskom will be compelled to implement Stage 2 load shedding at short notice.

‘Closely monitoring’

“Efforts are underway to return seven generation units to service between the evening peak and Tuesday evening,” Eskom said in a short statement.

“Our teams are closely monitoring the situation, and further updates will be provided at 22h00 or earlier if necessary.”

While load shedding has reared its ugly head in recent weeks, progress is being made in ending the outages.

As reported by The South African website, Unit 6 of Eskom’s Kusile Power Station has been successfully added to the national grid.

Eskom announced that the final unit at the Mpumalanga-based power station, was successfully added to the national grid late on Sunday afternoon.

“This achievement marks a crucial step toward completing one of South Africa’s largest infrastructure projects and is a key milestone in Eskom’s strategic objective of adding 2 500MW of new capacity to the grid by March 2025,” the statement read.

‘South Africa’s largest infrastructure project’

This means that once all units are fully operational, the Kusile Power Station will contribute 4 800MW to the national grid, making it South Africa’s largest infrastructure project.

Meanwhile, its sister project, the Medupi Power Station, will see its Unit 4 return 800MW by the end of April 2025 after an extended outage caused by a generator stator failure and the completion of the project.