Cape Town — Eskom has cautioned customers to prepare for further outages ahead of the winter season, as the power utility will enforce planned maintenance outages.
The power utility suspended loadshedding on Sunday afternoon after it announced Stage 3 for the weekend. The power utility announced that more than 300 MW of generation capacity and replenishment of emergency reserves were recovered.
Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokowena said efforts to restore the grid capacity were ongoing as the team looked to make loadshedding a thing of the past.
“The team is working diligently to restore 4091 megawatts to service by Monday. We maintain our guidance that loadshedding is largely behind us due to structural improvements in the generation fleet. While baseload capacity remains constrained, our generation recovery plan is addressing this challenge,” Eskom announced.
Sunday, 9 March 2025:
After the recovery of more than 3 000MW of generation capacity and replenishment of sufficient emergency reserves in the past 44 hours, loadshedding will be suspended today at 10:00.
Coal operations at Kusile Power Station are at optimal…
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) March 9, 2025
According to The Citizen, Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgotsientsho Ramokgopa did not comment on whether there was any sabotage at Eskom. The minister was disappointed with the recent performances at Eskom’s power stations.
Ramokgopa expressed that the problems at Eskom’s power stations were “non-technical related issues”.
“We have become complacent. So it can’t be normal; it can’t be that we are reversing the gains that we have accumulated over time. I already know which candidate power stations are consistently dropping the ball,” he said.
He said the issue of sabotage was used to undermine the work done at Eskom, and he said it was a conversation that did not belong in public.
“One thing I will not do is to manufacture excuses, so I will not mislead the country. We know what happened at Koeberg. We know what happened in Kusile, the two units that went out. We know what happened at Majuba. We know what happened at Camden. We’ll go and address that situation,” he said.
Follow African Insider on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
For more African news, visit Africaninsider.com
Compiled by Matthew Petersen
