Eskom on Thursday announced that it would once again implement load shedding, after more than three weeks without power cuts.

The power utility announced earlier this week that it resorted to burning diesel and its pumped storage schemes to generate the requisite power to avoid load shedding. This after its unavailable capacity rose above the 12 500MW mark.

But since yesterday, its situation has grown much worse.

“Today we lost three additional generation units and had to use our emergency reserves in order to meet demand throughout the day,” it noted in a statement on Thursday night.

“As a result our emergency reserves are now at critically low levels, and need to be replenished overnight in order to meet tomorrow’s forecasted demand”.

This ultimately means that Stage 2 load shedding will be in effect from 10pm Thursday until 5am Friday.

It’s not yet clear if load shedding will be implemented beyond the morning peak on Friday.

Developing…

Feature image: kloxklox via Pixabay