【Ferro-alloys.com】:Eskom has announced slightly reduced load-shedding will be implemented from noon on Monday, 18 September 2023, due to an improvement in generation capacity and performance.

Instead of stage 2 load-shedding, the utility will decrease the rotational power cuts to stage 1 from 12:00 until 16:00.

It will then ramp up to stage 3 load-shedding from 16:00 until 05:00 on Tuesday morning, instead of stage 4 as previously planned.

Thereafter, load-shedding will be implemented as previously communicated, alternating between stage 2 during the daytime (05:00—16:00) and stage 4 during the evening and early morning hours (16:00—05:00).

Eskom will publish another update should any significant changes occur.

Weekend relief

The reprieve in load-shedding comes after Eskom was able to suspend the outages for at least 23 hours over the past weekend.

One of the major contributors to Eskom’s recent increased generation availability is the return of the 800MW Kusile Unit 4, which had been taken offline for 20 days of planned maintenance.

Electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has also said that the power station’s Units 1, 2, and 3, which were taken offline after a flue-gas desulphurisation chimney collapse in October 2022, could return between October and November 2023.

“We’ve been able to shed a month on the return of Unit 3, and the expectation is that we should be able to return this unit by 14 October,” Ramokgopa said. “The same is applicable for Unit 1. We should be able to get it on 30 October.”

The return to service of Unit 2 has been moved forward from 24 December to 30 November.

These three units have a combined capacity of 2,100MW, roughly equivalent to two stages of load-shedding.

The table below summarises the load-shedding schedule for the next few days.

• [Editor:Alakay]