Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown has called on Eskom’s residential and business customers to use energy sparingly as the winter season approaches.

The Minister said this following the power utility’s decision to implement load shedding over the past few days due to a shortage in generating capacity.

Briefing journalists in Cape Town on Wednesday, the Minister apologised to the public for the inconvenience caused by load shedding.

“This year, Eskom has been following its preventative maintenance schedules to the aging plants so that the recovery to sustainable and reliable power generation is expedited.

“This will understandably place strain on the system over the short term as … additional plant failures, as experienced over the past few days which took us into stage two and stage three load shedding, might occur.

Shortage of generation capacity and technical faults

On Monday, Eskom implemented stage two load shedding and load curtailment from 4pm until 10pm due to a shortage of generating capacity because several units were out of service due to planned and unplanned outages.

On Tuesday, the situation worsened at 6pm when stage three had to be implemented due to a further shortage of generation capacity as additional units had to be taken out of service for unplanned maintenance caused by technical faults, the Minister said.

“Load shedding at stage three shows the seriousness of the constraints that we face but it is in no way an indication that we are close to a black-out,” she said.

While she could not give further details that touched on operational occurrences at various plants, the Minister said Eskom’s acting chairperson Dr Ben Ngubane has provided her with a detailed report on what happened during the last week.

She said about 9 500 megawatts of power was lost when some units went off-line.

Load shedding will be with the country for the next two years, the Minister said.

“It is expected that the situation would continue throughout winter when consumption is higher as the constraints on the grid mean that planned, controlled, and rotational load shedding and load curtailment, are introduced to protect the power system.”