Eskom implemented stage six load shedding in the early hours of yesterday morning, plunging the country into a fresh wave of uncertainty. The very bad news is that the parastatal cannot say how long this latest severe stage will last, but the nation is now at risk of breaching the ’critical’ stage six.

President Cyril Ramaphosa last night confirmed that he will return to SA immediately after Queen Elizabeth II's funeral to deal with the crisis.

‘The President will no longer be travelling to New York (for a UN meeting) from London. Instead, he will head home to deal with current stage six load shedding,’ said Presidency spokesperson Vincent Ngwenya. Ramaphosa yesterday held a virtual meeting with ‘relevant’ government Ministers and officials to establish why so many units tripped and what could be done immediately to resolve the situation.

Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter confirmed the system was under pressure for the past week, which had caused the company to use its reserves as well as diesel.

‘We are now at a situation where we need to urgently replenish those reserves in order to maintain an adequate safety buffer as we are required to do by the grid code. We are planning to bring back 1 590MW by (last night’s) peak and then a further 3 500MW by Monday evening,’ said De Ruyter.

However, he added that not all of the energy will make its way smoothly onto the grid due to the age and condition of the units. ‘The focus will be to ensure that our emergencies are protected,’ Oberholzer said.

A report on the EWN site notes that De Ruyter said over the past five months of this financial year, ‘we have already burned our way through R7.7bn worth of diesel which is just about the budget for the whole year’.

City Press reports that De Ruyter warned that a catastrophe is looming should Eskom dip too far into its emergency reserves.

He said escalating power outages were a necessity to protect the integrity of the system, as open-cycle gas turbines as well as water at the pump storage facilities needed to be shut down as ‘our water is extremely low’.

Fin24 reports that De Ruyter said Eskom had considered continuous load shedding and to ‘normalise’ it at stage two.

This would give it more scope to plan for maintenance.

However, it was decided that doing this would not add ‘significant additional’ headroom for doing maintenance.

‘We have debated (permanent load shedding) extensively internally. In a certain way, the planned maintenance we carry out contributes to load shedding because it is capacity that we plan to take off the grid,’ De Ruyter said.

In the end, however, Eskom decided against it, he said.

Full EWN report

Full City Press report

Full report on the Fin24 site