Eskom state load shedding to continue until Saturday.

Cape Town mayor, Jordan Hill-Lewis, has criticized the last minute notice for load shedding by Eskom after the power utility was granted a 9.61% electricity price hike last week. Yesterday the power utility announced that stage 2 blackouts would be implemented from 5pm.

This is after multiple generating unit failures occurred at the weekend, which severely reduced the available generating capacity.

South Africans can expect electricity outages from Monday 5pm until 5am on Tuesday. This will be repeated again from 9pm on Tuesday until 5am on Wednesday, Eskom said. However the power utility said that load shedding would continue until Saturday.

The power utility expects generation units to return to service over the next 24 hours; however, load shedding will occur at short notice if there are any more significant breakdowns.

Hill-Lewis slammed Eskom for continuously halting South Africa’s economy. He said the economy could not grow and alleviate poverty when prices continued to increase and electricity availability continued to decrease.

The mayor concluded that this was the reason why the City of Cape Town was going ahead to reduce reliance on Eskom and increasing the amount of Independent Power Producers.

 


image: Esi Africa

by Evengelista Muza

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