From News24
Cape Town – Without announcing definite power cuts for Monday, Eskom warned in a tweet that the “load shedding prognosis for today is medium to high” and is “dependent on the performance of our power plants”.
This follows eight straight days of load shedding in which Eskom switched between stage 1, 2 and 3 and started on different times of the day. Last week the power utility also unveiled plans that it will replace stage 3b with stage 4 for ease of communication.
It was also a week of big announcements for Eskom, with Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown announcing on Thursday that she has seconded Transnet CEO Brian Molefe and appointed him as the acting Eskom CEO with immediate effect after Tshediso Matona was suspended in March.
Molefe has been in his role at Transnet since 2011 and was the Public Investment Corporation CEO from 2003 to 2010.
Brown also announced that Dentons had been selected to conduct the deep dive inquiry into Eskom’s financial troubles.
Eskom has implemented load shedding for more than 30 days since the beginning of the year, as it battles to keep up with its supply of electricity.
Data shows in the first 100 days of the year Eskom has effectively cut off 43 000MW of electricity to municipality customers during the three stages of load shedding it has implemented since January 1.
Eskom said in a statement on Sunday the electricity supply system remains very vulnerable for the rest of the week due to a shortage of generation capacity as several units are currently out of service due to planned and unplanned outages.
“Any unforeseen incident in the power system could thus trigger the implementation of load shedding,” Eskom said. – Fin24
