'Eskom LoadShedding woes largely due to lack of maintenance'
Johannesburg - South Africa's current power crunch, which has seen state-owned Eskom implement rotational blackouts to avoid a collapse of the national grid, is largely due to a lack of maintenance of the utility's ageing infrastructure, officials said on Tuesday.
"We understand the frustration. We don’t have a magic formula," he told a news conference, noting that while Eskom had 48 000 MW of installed capacity, only 28 000 MW was currently available. Both acknowledged that Eskom had not communicated its problems to the public openly enough, and Gordhan committed to providing another update in about 14 days on how the current challenges were being addressed.
Eskom supplies 95 percent of South Africa's electricty needs but the cash-strapped utility has struggled to do this in recent years. Several former senior officials have also been forced out after being implicated in corruption. As South Africans grappled with the electricity shortages, the main opposition Democratic Alliance said it would engage with Johannesburg residents on issues they faced on a daily basis "especially load shedding, which then leads to jobs-shedding".
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