Just yesterday Eskom put South Africa under stage 3 loadshedding owing to generation units at three power stations being taken offline.
Today however, despite the high number of breakdowns making the power system “unpredictable”, Eskom has said that there will no loadshedding. If we were the betting sort we’d have put on this happening as today also happens to be the State of the Nation Address (SONA).
That’s not the only reason we can expect electricity all day.
No loadshedding will be implemented today as generation capacity sufficiently recovers pic.twitter.com/OXPN7vIsrM
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) February 11, 2021
The utility reports that four generation units have been returned to service while another five are expected to return to service in the next two days.
“The loadshedding of the past tow days has also enabled Eskom to adequately replenish the emergency generation reserves. Eskom would like to thank the people of South Africa for their patience and support during the loadshedding, which is implemented as a last resort in order to protect the integrity of the system,” the utility wrote in a power alert on Thursday morning.
Per that alert, planned maintenance means 4 928MW of capacity is unavailable and 13 217MW of capacity unavailable due to unplanned maintenance.
As mentioned, President Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver the State of the Nation Address this evening and South Africans will surely be hoping Eskom is addressed during the speech.
This week it was revealed by Eskom that the De Wilge Residential Development Project in Mpumalanga was a waste of taxpayer money. The De Wilge Residential Development Project was started in 2008 with a budget of R160 million. This was ultimately meant to build 336 flats for Kusile power station workers.
However, the project’s cost grew to R840 million in 2019 and this week Eskom admitted that it was all ultimately a waste of money.
While Eskom says it’s in talks to sell the property, South Africans are quite rightly angry about this news.
Will Ramaphosa and his cabinet address the deep rooted problems at Eskom? Will it have a viable solution to the utilities constant and costly failings?
We’ll have to wait until 19:00 this evening to find out.
