Eskom last night called off the planned outage of Koeberg unit one at the eleventh hour as the utility scrambled to avoid moving to stage seven load shedding.

The decision, not yet announced by the utility, was confirmed to News24 by two independent sources who did not want to be named as they are not authorised to speak to the media.

Eskom reported a staggering 19 000MW of breakdowns yesterday.

The additional units lost in the evening took this to over 20 000MW. It also had about 5 000MW on planned maintenance and a reserve margin requirement of 1 000MW.

Eskom earlier said that the six-month outage scheduled to start on Koeberg today was on track and would go ahead.

But a decision to shift the outage out by a couple of days was made in the evening after Eskom lost an additional two units, including one from Medupi.

The Eskom board and officials from the Presidency were last locked in a meeting to find solutions to mitigate the crisis.

The Koeberg unit one outage cannot be delayed for long.

Teams from international contractors are already on-site and there is a looming deadline of 2024 for Eskom to complete the replacement of the steam generators to satisfy the regulator to license the extension of life by 20 years.

Full News24 report