South Africa’s Eskom has successfully brought six units back online at its power stations after enacting its most severe level of controlled power cuts early on Sunday, following several outages at Majuba and Camden power plants over the weekend. On Saturday, Eskom implemented Stage 3 power cuts, resulting in a reduction of 3,000 megawatts from the national grid. “Out of the 10 units that went offline overnight, we have effectively restored six units,” stated Dan Marokane, Eskom’s group CEO, during a press briefing on Sunday.
He mentioned that five to six additional units were expected to come back into service throughout the day, enhancing the 3,200 MW of capacity recovered overnight. “We expect to move away from this stage by the end of the week,” he added, noting that based on the recovery speed, Eskom would consider reducing its power cuts by Monday.
Frequent breakdowns at Eskom’s aging coal-fired power plants, which supply the majority of electricity in Africa’s most industrialized nation, are frequently responsible for loadshedding—an incremental approach where stage 1 signifies a 1,000 MW cut from the system, while stage 6 is the highest level implemented to date.
