South Africa, the continent’s leading industrial power with a population of nearly 60 million, is once again being hit hard by drastic power cuts caused by failures in aging and poorly maintained facilities, state-owned utility Eskom said Sunday.
Apologizing for the new intense outages at a press conference, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter announced “a high level of load shedding this week”.
On a scale of eight possible levels of load shedding intensity, the country has reached the sixth critical stage. For South Africans and businesses, this means several outages, lasting several hours, each day.
This sixth stage had already been reached in June, in a country then in the middle of the southern winter, with an increase in energy consumption and high pressure on production. The rise in temperatures since September with the arrival of spring usually leads to a drop in consumption, especially with the cessation of the use of heating means.
Eskom usually takes advantage of this period to shut down production units for maintenance.
But a high number of failures on the installations, 45 in the space of seven days, led to a dramatic drop in electricity production.
“Phase 6 load shedding will remain in effect until enough generation units are back up and running,” explained Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer.
After years of mismanagement and corruption, the public company is unable to produce enough energy for the country, which is regularly plunged into darkness and where demonstrations against the decay of public services are regularly organized.
Urging South Africans to use electricity sparingly, De Ruyter called for turning off lights in offices at night, avoiding running swimming pool pumps and water heaters at peak hours.
“If everyone plays their part, we can manage the demand,” he assured. The development of efficient large-scale generation capacity “will take time”, the CEO continued, adding that the possibility of permanent load shedding had been under consideration, but was eventually rejected.
South Africa gets 80% of its electricity from coal, creating serious pollution, which is denounced by environmentalists. The country obtained 7.7 billion euros for its energy transition at COP26.
