South Africa‘s state utility Eskom said on Sunday it would restore intermittent power outages from Monday to Wednesday overnight to deal with unplanned outages and replenish generation capacity. The beleaguered state-owned utility, which depends on aging coal-fired power plants that break down frequently, has been rolling out blackouts known locally as load shedding in the country for more than a decade.
The crisis has deepened this year due to the high cost of diesel and its lack of availability on the international market. “As far as possible, Eskom will try to limit load-shedding to night-time to have minimal impact on the economy and the population,” the company said in a statement, adding that it would introduce a roughly two-hour power outage of 1,600 local residents. time (1400 GMT) until midnight.
By mid-September, Eskom had already implemented more than 100 days of blackouts, with several major cities experiencing outages of more than six hours recently. Frequent power surges when power was restored also led to many localized faults in cables and transformers, leaving some locations in the commercial capital of Johannesburg without power for several days.
Eskom currently has 5,487 megawatts (MW) on scheduled maintenance, while another 14,061 MW of capacity was unavailable due to outages, the company said. It has approximately 45,000 MW of installed capacity.
Read Now :5.1-magnitude earthquake struck the Gulf of Corinth in central Greece
