South Africa’s power utility Eskom has announced that Stage 2 rotational load-shedding will take place from 09:00 on Tuesday until 05:00 on Saturday.
The announcement came to the surprise of South Africans, as Eskom was forced to reschedule load-shedding last night at short notice to begin earlier.
“While Eskom teams have successfully returned a unit each at the Kusile, Matimba, and Amot power stations during the early hours of this morning, further delays in returning other units to service have exacerbated the capacity constraints, hampering the ability to replenish the emergency generation reserves,” the power utility said.
Total breakdowns across Eskom’s stations amount to 13,333MW. The state-owned firm also said it hopes to return 6 power units to service during the week, including Koeberg Unit 1 during the weekend.
“Eskom would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused by the implementation of load-shedding, and requests the public to reduce the usage of electricity in order to help us through the constraints.”
Last week, the company said it was working to actively avoid having to implement load-shedding during the upcoming municipal elections on 1 November, but recent reports from Eskom paint a dire picture for the power utility and for South Africa’s non-load-shed future.
How to Find Out if Your Area Will Experience Loadshedding Today:
- EskomSePush
One of the quickest and easiest ways to find out if your area will face load-shedding any time soon, a way that doesn’t involve spending half an hour squinting at Eskom spreadsheets, is through the free app EskomSePush – available on iOS and Android.
The app was co-created by two Cape Town-based techies and aims to make navigating load-shedding easier for South Africans. Over the years the app has improved and its current state provides a very robust and simple guide to getting all the necessary load-shedding info.
It’s 3 simple steps on the app to find out when or if your area will face load-shedding.
- First, download and install the app on your favourite device.
- Press on the button that says “add a suburb.”
- This will send you to a search function. Here input the name of your area. Once you have found it, tap it to select.
You will be asked if you’d like to receive notifications about load-shedding in your area. These notifications will let you ignore Eskom’s tweets and other messaging, and if load-shedding is coming EskomSePush will let you know.
Here you will see when load-shedding will start in your area, if you have load-shedding today, when next you will have load-shedding and for how long your area will be load-shed. Allowing you time and information to plan ahead as necessary.
The app includes an entire load-shedding schedule for your area or any other areas you’d like to add, for example, the area your office is in or your parents’ home. The app will tell you if load-shedding is expected and when, and it will also tell you how load-shedding will last.
EskomSePush also gives load-shedding insights and history. Currently, the app says South Africa has faced 34.4 days of load-shedding this year. It even comes with a load-shedding forecast, which currently expects no load-shedding on the weekend as per Eskom.
New features like a really popular area chat option (68,943 individuals online as of the writing of this article) so you can talk to people in your vicinity in real-time about power outages or join many in complaining.
There is even a new map feature that is being tested which shows you area-specific power outages across SA.
By Luis Monzon
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