South African power cuts resume as key plants fail
South African power utility Eskom resumed scheduled power cuts on Friday and said they would last across the weekend, after outages at the country's nuclear power station and one of its mammoth coal plants.
The loss of power from units at the Koeberg nuclear plant and Kusile coal station meant Eskom was 2,700 megawatts (MW) short of its generation capacity over the past 14 hours, the company said in a statement.
It will implement "Stage 3" outages, requiring up to 3,000 MW to be shed from the national grid, until Monday morning while it replenishes its emergency reserves.
"Eskom is focused on deploying extra engineering resources to expedite the repair of units currently offline," it said in a statement, adding that it expected to return 6,200 MW of capacity to service by Monday evening's peak in electricity demand.
Power cuts have been a regular feature of life in South Africa for more than a decade, with outages reaching record levels in 2023 when they occurred on more than 300 days in the year.
The power cuts stopped in March last year but have resumed intermittently since the end of January. Eskom said on Friday that the country was far from returning to the dark days of 2023.
"South Africa is in no way returning to the levels of loadshedding that we experienced in 2023," said Bheki Nxumalo, Eskom's group executive for generation, using a term for power outages.
The loadshedding stages Eskom implements are an incremental system where Stage 1 sees up to 1,000 MW of capacity cut from the grid and Stage 6 - with 6,000 MW cut - the highest level implemented to date.
South Africa's electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa will brief reporters on Saturday on Eskom's performance.
Cover photo: A general view of South Africa's Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, in Cape Town, South Africa October 10, 2024. REUTERS/Esa Alexander/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
