Eskom announced on Sunday evening that Stage 2 loadshedding would continue until Thursday morning with breaks to allow morning rush hour traffic to flow more easily.

With loadshedding being a prominent feature of the weekend, Eskom said that power cuts would continue throughout the week as it restored emergency supplies.

“Unplanned outages or breakdowns were at 11 831MW as at 17:00 this afternoon. While good progress has been made in replenishing water for our pumped storage schemes, we have not fully replenished diesel for our open cycle gas turbines,” said Eskom.

The good news (as good as news about power cuts could be we suppose) is that from 06:00 to 09:00 every morning Eskom will suspend loadshedding, or least try to.

“While loadshedding is unavoidable, in an effort to minimise the impact on traffic, we will endeavor to provide a breaking in loadshedding from 06:00 to 09:00 each day in the week, when possible,” said Eskom.

The utility said that it was conducting critical maintenance on units taken offline in planned outages as well as those on unplanned outages.

On Friday Eskom’s group chief executive officer, Andre De Ruyter warned South Africans that due to the amount of maintenance needed loadshedding would be a feature of their lives for at least 18 months.

While we would prefer no loadshedding, being able to plan our week around power cuts is rather helpful and we appreciate this forward thinking on Eskom’s part.

As always, loadshedding schedules can be found online and via the EskomSePush app for Android and iOS.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]