Cape Town – Eskom chief executive officer André de Ruyter reportedly said on Sunday that the power utility had considered continuous load shedding and to “normalise” it at Stage 2, instead of introducing it when the power system faced a crunch.
The power utility, however, decided against it for now, Fin24 reported.
“We have debated [permanent load shedding] extensively internally. In a certain way, the planned maintenance we carry out contributes to load shedding because it is capacity that we plan to take off the grid,” the report quoted De Ruyter as saying.
Eskom escalated load shedding from Stage 5 to Stage 6 on Sunday morning following the tripping of a generation unit each at Kusile and Kriel power stations.
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Stage 6 was set to continue on Monday, with “high levels” of load shedding expected for the week, Eskom warned.
According to The Citizen, De Ruyter ensured consumers that the ailing parastatal was doing its best to avoid a total system collapse by implementing stage 6 load shedding.
He also denied claims that sabotage could be responsible for the load shedding that currently has the country in a stranglehold, the repor said.
“One of the obvious questions to ask and when one thinks about load shedding, particularly stage 6 load shedding, is whether there is any evidence of sabotage. At this stage, I can give you assurance that we have not seen any evidence of untoward activity leading to this spate of trips,” De Ruyter said.
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Compiled by Betha Madhomu
