Tue, 11 March 2025

Eskom issued an urgent alert warning of a high risk of load-shedding at short notice on Monday evening following breakdowns which took six generation units offline and requiring the use of emergency reserves.

The South African power utility warned on Monday evening that should an additional 800MW be lost they would need to implement stage 2 load-shedding at short notice.

The news followed an earlier statement regarding the successful addition of Kusile Power Station’s final unit to the national grid on Monday afternoon.

Kusile Power Station is expected to contribute a total of 4 800MW to the national grid once all units are fully operational.

Eskom's other new power station – Medupi – is scheduled to add another 800MW from unit 4 by the end of April 2025, following an extended outage due to a generator stator failure.

“We reiterate our commitment to ensuring that South Africa is in no way returning to the levels of loadshedding that we experienced in 2023 and, our focus remains on delivering a more reliable, resilient, and sustainable power system for the country.” said Eskom Group Chief Executive, Dan Marokane.

Over the next six months, the Kusile unit will undergo extensive testing and optimisation before reaching commercial operation, when its 800MW capacity will be officially added to the Eskom generation fleet.

Eskom said efforts were underway to return seven generation units that are currently offline to service between the evening peak on Monday and Tuesday evening.

As of Tuesday morning it appears as if the risk of load-shedding remained very high.

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