JOHANNESBURG – It has been eight straight days without power cuts, with many South Africans wondering why we haven’t been hit with blackouts.

Earlier this month, while the country was gripped by stage 4 power cuts, Eskom warned South Africans to expect the power cuts to continue throughout the rest of the winter, especially during the evening peak periods.

At one point this month, 15 generating units were offline at Eskom’s aging power plants.

“We’ve managed to return to service unit 1 of Koeberg which generates 900MW of electricity – that on its own takes away a stage of load shedding,” Eskom spokesperson Sikonathi Mantshantsha said.

He said that the Koeberg win, and other smaller victories, had all added up and there had not been a need to turn off the power for more than a week now.

He also said that crucial machines at Eskom were holding up and at the moment, the utility was supplying 30,000 megawatts (MW) of power, which increased during the evening peak.

Mantshantsha said that they had not skimped on maintenance either.

“We are doing plenty of maintenance. At this particular point, we have 3,000MW on planned maintenance. We have another 10,900MW on breakdowns – that gives you about 14,000MW not available at the moment.”

However, he warned that as the country was still in the grip of the winter period, which automatically ramped up power usage, Eskom may need to implement power cuts at any time.

While we’ve made it through eight straight days without rolling blackouts, many communities were still being hit with load reduction, as Eskom tried to protect its network from overloading in high-density parts of the country.

Source: Eyewitness News
Link: https://ewn.co.za/2021/06/22/eskom-explains-why-sa-has-had-no-power-cuts-for-the-last-8-days