South Africa won’t be avoiding load shedding into the new year.
Eskom says that it is no longer able to keep the lights on into the new year, and that load shedding will no longer be suspended on Saturday .
“Due to the breakdown of five generating units since yesterday afternoon, it is no longer possible to suspend load shedding at 16h00 today, as previously communicated,” the group said.More than half of 2022 has seen days with load shedding, with South Africa hitting the 200 day mark on Tuesday – and things are only expected to get worse in 2023.
South Africa is likely to sit with prolonged levels of load shedding for the foreseeable future. On Saturday 1,000MW was removed from the grid through Koeberg unit 1 being taken offline, and approximately 3,000MW is offline from various breakdowns at Kusile and Medupi. According to Eskom’s outlook for the next year, it needs to keep breakdowns below 13,000MW to stave off the worst of load shedding, but the utility has struggled to keep outages below 16,000MW – the worst-case scenario in its plans.
Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter announced his resignation this week on the back of the worst levels of load shedding on record. While Public Enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan acknowledged that de Ruyter is not to blame for the load shedding, the power utility has not been able to resolve the crisis under his leadership.