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South Africa Returns to Brink of Record Electricity Outages

South Africa’s state-owned power utility will remove 6,000 megawatts from the national grid until further notice due to breakdowns at power stations, raising the risk of a new record for daily electricity rationing. 
Bloomberg
By Bloomberg
11 Jan
City Skylines As Richest South African City Seeks Private Power to Cut Blackouts A visitor looks out towards the Telkom Tower and city skyline from the Ponte City Apartments building in the Berea district of Johannesburg, South Africa, on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic hub and its richest city, is seeking electricity supply from private generators to reduce the amount of scheduled power outages.

Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. will implement the so-called stage-6 load shedding from 4 p.m. on Wednesday “due to severe capacity constraints” at eight coal-powered plants, it said in a statement. That equates to consumers being deprived of power for six or more hours a day.

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The struggling utility rationed power on 205 days of last year. While Eskom has never cut more than 6,000 megawatts at a time from the grid, it has used up diesel supplies allocated for the year through March and a unit at its nuclear plant is shut down for a revamp. That means any additional faults among its assets and infrastructure could move the country to a a higher level of outages.

 

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