The embattled power utility Eskom announced the suspension of load shedding from Sunday evening 13 March at 8 p.m. The announcement comes after a week of outages which began from level 2 and moved to level 4 rapidly. On Friday the outages moved back to level 2 and on Sunday evening the announcement of the end of the outages was announced.
Eskom suffered a great loss this past week with numerous units generating power having collapsed. The global price hike in oil which is caused by the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia has caused the power utility to struggle to use the diesel reserves.
In a statement Eskom said, “We would like to thank the people of South Africa for their support and patience during the period of load shedding. Eskom takes its mandate of supplying electricity to South Africa seriously and is fully aware of the impact load shedding is having on the whole country. Unfortunately, at times, it becomes necessary to implement load shedding”.
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Eskom added that the generating units will remain under pressure on Monday and Tuesday, but there is an expectation of eight generating units to return to service by Wednesday. Four generating units have been recovered since Friday and its emergency generation reserves have also recovered.
“Eskom requests the assistance of all South Africans to use electricity sparingly. Eskom would like to again apologise for the implementation of load shedding during the past week”. Sikonathi Mantshatsha, Eskom spokesperson, said the embattled power utility deeply apologizes to South Africans for the outages.
Source: Times Live, Eyewitness News, Fin24, image from Times Live
