Illustratiave image, from left: Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa; An Eskom coal-fired power station. (Photos: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach | Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg via Getty Images) | Flickr | Adobe Stock) 
‘A setback [is] unacceptable, and we understand your anger, your disappointment, your grievance. We will resolve this,” said Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramokgopa on Sunday after Stage 6 load shedding was implemented in the early hours of Sunday.
For the second time this year South Africa was plunged into unexpected darkness as Eskom announced the return of rolling blackouts this weekend, with power cuts expected to persist throughout the week until Eskom can rein it in.
Read more: Stage 3 load shedding across South Africa this weekend — power station ‘boiler tube failures’
On Saturday it was announced that Eskom had encountered another “temporary” setback, resulting in Stage 3 load shedding until further notice.
Then in the dead of the night on Sunday, at about 1.30am, Eskom announced that Stage 6 load shedding had been implemented after multiple unit trips at Camden Power Station, following the earlier Stage 3 caused by multiple unit trips at Majuba and a unit trip at Medupi.
This resulted in a 3,864MW loss in generation capacity, combined with 7,506MW which was offline for planned maintenance. Eskom said Stage 6 load shedding was essential to replenish emergency reserves and prepare for the week.
But in Sunday’s media briefing Ramokgopa said load shedding would continue until the end of the week.
Before the end of January 2025, Eskom, the government and the public marked the “milestone” of 300 consecutive days without load shedding.
On Sunday, Ramokgopa said that once this round of load shedding has been dealt with “we’re starting on another run, and hopefully this is the final run and we’ll speak of load shedding in historic terms, [as] an account of what once went wrong and in fact [that] this country has been able to correct it”.
Read more: Eskom news
Read more: Eskom Intelligence Files
The previous bout of load shedding occurred at the beginning of February 2025 and, according to Eskom management, resulted from breakdowns at six units, including at the Matimba and Lethabo power stations which was owing to boiler tube failures.
The announcement of load shedding was made shortly after the National Energy Regulator of South Africa confirmed that Eskom would only be receiving a 12.7% tariff increase in the 2025/26 financial year, not the 36% increase the utility had originally requested. Civilians and groups speculated that the reintroduction of load shedding was in retaliation for this.
Read more: How South Africans fought and won against the devastating 36% Eskom increase bid
On Sunday, Ramokgopa sought to address any rumours of sabotage linked to the current power cuts by saying these were the result of technical issues, with the electricity supply expected to stabilise by the end of the week.
“I want to repeat that there’s nothing underhand, we are not suspecting any sabotage on the basis of the evidence that is before us. We can explain what has happened with the responsibility that we are going to fix it. We’re not going to manufacture reasons,” he said.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/20V4415.jpg "Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa at Kusile Power Station on 11 September 2023. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)")
“We take full responsibility and accountability, in the same manner that we bask in the glory of uninterrupted days of load shedding.
“When there are difficult moments, like Stage 6… I’m the minister and I bear the responsibility, working with Eskom, so there’s no other person but myself. The buck stops here.”
The minister said they have accepted that there will be these setbacks and would do everything possible to address them. He was speaking about the generation recovery plan, which Ramokgopa said was still yielding positive results despite the load shedding “setbacks” in 2024.
Read more: Eskom marks 300 days without load shedding — for the first time since 2018
“We want to eliminate load shedding as a structural constraint, and we are confident that the actions we have taken over the past 16 months are pointing us in the right direction, and we’ve accepted that there are going to be moments of setbacks, and this is exactly that moment. We take full responsibility. We take full accountability,” he said.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/OD-Ed-Eskom-suspend2.jpg "Majuba Power Station in Volksrust, Mpumalanga, on 4 November 2014. (Photo: Gallo Images / The Times / Moeletsi Mabe)")
What went wrong this time?
According to Eskom CEO Dan Marokane, what pushed South Africa to Stage 6 was the loss of multiple units at the 4,110MW Majuba Power Station after a transformer overload.
Marokane said the overload was the result of the startup of a unit that was coming out of a long-term outage, and that essentially started the domino effect of reticulation, cutting supply to the rest of the units, and one by one those units gave in.
This, Marokane said, had more to do with the support of power to the compressors for both systems in the units. “We have understood the exact nature of how they even came about and were able to isolate it overnight and start addressing it.”
This week, Eskom would dive deeper into ensuring it could contain such occurrences, and assess where else the risk may be lying in its fleet.
At Camden, a hydraulic valve had failed and cooling water pumps were not adequate for maintaining the requirements of the remaining units that were running, so those too had been lost.
When Eskom discovered the situation at Majuba, Marokane said, it coincided with the trip at Medupi which had to do with the underfrequency in the network overall and pushed the unit at Medupi into a position where it tripped.
Marokane added that they had to implement Stage 3 load shedding on Saturday to build and protect the demand, as well as build the capacity to preserve the reserves, which had been used extensively in the week.
At 1am on Sunday, when the Camden situation unfolded, Marokane said they had to raise the level of load shedding because they had to run the reserves much harder, and that would have presented problems for recovery today and in the rest of the week.
Of the 10 units that were lost overnight on Sunday, they had returned about six.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ED_508963.jpg "Eskom CEO Dan Marokane briefs the media on his 100 days in office at Megawatt Park in Johannesburg on 14 June 2024. (Photo: Gallo Images / Sharon Seretlo)")
“We have five or six units that are placed to come back in operation today [Sunday], and we’ll take stock just after eight o’clock this [Sunday] evening, after the evening peak,” Marokane said.
The main focus was on Majuba, where five units had been lost. Marokane said two of those were back by 6am on Sunday, with two more expected to come back in the course of Sunday and Monday.
And at Camden, two of those units that had been lost in the morning, were back on track.
“We should have all of the power station units that are available back in operation, and we’ll proceed up to Tuesday to bring the rest of the Camden units back in operation,” Marokane said.
Eskom’s Generation Recovery Plan
Despite the above shortfalls, Majuba and Camden had both done well in their overall generation recovery performance up until the trips occurred, according to the CEO. Majuba was running at about 68% energy availability factor and Camden at 61% EAF.
“The work that we have done in actually driving operational recovery [at] these units has substantially given us good results. These are mainstay stations, essentially, in terms of our corner points, and what we’re dealing with here are electrical and control systems issues that we’ll attend to,” Marokane said.
Eskon’s Generation Recovery Plan was launched in April 2023 to improve the reliability of South Africa’s electricity supply.
“We anticipate getting out of this stage by the end of the week. With the recovery pace that we are experiencing thus far and anticipate for the rest of the day, we should be able to take a view around stepping down from Stage 6 load shedding by tomorrow. And we will, on the basis of the actual recovery itself, make a call and the recovery of our reserves, make a call in terms of how we step down… to a point where we have shedding for the remainder of the week,” Marokane said.
This week would be important for Eskom. Marokane said the first three days are crucial in Eskom’s recovery programme, but that they are encouraged by the overnight recovery and the plans that need to be delivered for the rest of Sunday and the week.
After the news of load shedding’s reinstatement, recordings began circulating on social media alleging that the real reason load shedding was being implemented was that Eskom’s supply of diesel was stopped after the power utility refused to pay a supplier their R5-million diesel bill last week.
In response to these allegations, Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena told Daily Maverick: “We saw the video that is making the rounds on this and Eskom can confirm that there is absolutely no truth to this rumour.”
Mokwena said Eskom would continue to update the country about the reasons for this load shedding, as it did in a media briefing on Sunday and with their tweet on Sunday morning.
“Additionally, we adhere to the payment terms outlined in our contract with suppliers,” said Mokwena. DM