South Africans need to brace themselves for the possibility of stage 6 loadshedding on Tuesday evening.
Eskom chief executive, André de Ruyter, said at a media briefing on Tuesday morning that the parastatal could be forced to implement stage 6 loadshedding. He said there had been a significant overnight deterioration of its operations which could lead to the need for stage 6 loadshedding on Tuesday night.
De Ruyter said in an emergency meeting that ten operating units had been lost overnight, which had led to total unplanned energy generation losses of 14 204MW.
Eskom’s generation woes have been intensified by the ongoing illegal strike, which led to losses of an additional 3 651MW. He said Eskom was working to bring more units online before this evening, however the risk of stage 6 power cuts remained high.
Stage 6 loadshedding means that rolling blackouts will be scheduled for four hours at a time and would remove 2000MW of demand from the grid.
De Ruyter said many of Eskom’s illegal strikers had intimidated many of its employees into staying away from work, while strikers had disrupted activities and blocked roads to prevent the delivery of coal.
He said the parastatal still faced a maintenance backlog and even if the strike was called off, loadshedding was likely to continue.
Chief operating officer, Jan Oberholzer, said the power utility was experiencing a deficit in power supply during the evening peak of about 1 400MW, even under stage 4 loadshedding.
Eskom’s peak hours are between 05h00 and 09h00 and 16h00 and 22h00.
