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.
Keep Reading
- Govt to blame for donor dependency
- BCC flights multiple tenders
- Patent rights — reap more benefits, profits
- Crypto integration incentivises Africa fintech transition
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.
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.
