For the first time in 10 months, South African homes and businesses were hit by scheduled power cuts on Friday due to breakdowns at state power utility Eskom Holdings’ coal-fired power stations.
Energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa told reporters that Eskom had depleted its reserves and would implement “Stage 3” power cuts, requiring up to 3,000 megawatts of capacity to be shed from the national grid.
“We got hit by a perfect storm,” Ramokgopa said, referring to the breakdowns happening when a number of units were offline for maintenance.
An Eskom executive said six units had gone offline at two of the company’s best-performing coal stations, Lethabo and Matimba, amounting to about 3,600 MW of capacity.
“Over the past seven days, we have experienced several breakdowns that require extended repair times”, said Eskom Chief Executive, Dan Marokane, in a statement.
Marokane described the return of power cuts in Africa’s most industrialised economy as a “temporary setback” and said the country was still within reach of ending electricity outages due to structural improvements in its generation fleet.
The outages started at 5 p.m. (1500 GMT) on Friday and will last until at least midnight on Sunday.
Eskom has said that it may even implement up to Stage 4 power cuts over the weekend.
Power cuts have been a drag on South Africa’s economic growth for more than a decade, but there had been none since March last year after a sudden turnaround in the performance of Eskom’s generation fleet.
Eskom said last month it projected a return to profit making for the first time in eight years due to improved power supply and a debt relief package from the government, despite suffering a whooping $3 billion loss.
A seemingly bad week for Eskom
Last week, Eskom Holdings celebrated what was a significant milestone at the time, where they had achieved 300 consecutive days of no power cuts for the first time since 2018.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, South Africa’s Auditor- General released a report, casting doubt on Eskom’s financial viability due to “irregular expenditure, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, as well as losses due to criminal conduct”.
Then yesterday, The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA), announced a tariff increase of 12.7%, roughly a third of the 36.15% Eskom had requested.
The recent power cuts is just the latest in the string of uncomfortable news the company has been featured in lately.
