JOHANNESBURG — South African businesses and households will experience scheduled power cuts for the first time in 10 months due to breakdowns and planned repairs at State power utility Eskom’s coal-fired power stations, officials said yesterday.
Energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa told reporters that Eskom had depleted its reserves and as a result would implement “Stage 3” power cuts, requiring up to 3 000 megawatts of capacity to be shed from the national grid.
The outages would start from 5pm (1500 GMT) yesterday.
“We got hit by a perfect storm,” he said, referring to the breakdowns happening when a number of units were offline for maintenance.
Ramokgopa described the return of power cuts in Africa’s most industrialised economy as a “temporary setback” and said the country was still within reach of ending electricity outages.
Power cuts have been a drag on South Africa’s economic growth for more than a decade, but there had been none since March last year after a sudden turnaround in the performance of Eskom’s generation fleet.
Eskom said last month that it expected to post its first annual profit in eight years, helped by improved power supply and a debt relief package from the government.
However, in a potential setback for its turnaround efforts, South Africa’s energy regulator awarded it an average tariff increase of 12,7% on Thursday for the financial year that starts in April, roughly a third of what it had asked for.
- Govt to blame for donor dependency
- BCC flights multiple tenders
- Patent rights — reap more benefits, profits
- Crypto integration incentivises Africa fintech transition
Keep Reading
The regulator’s decision effectively denies Eskom tens of billions of rand that the company said it needs to deal with coal contracts, a higher carbon tax and rising debt from municipalities.
