Photo by: Duane Daws
State-owned power utility Eskom on Thursday said the country’s power system was stable and was expected to remain so over the weekend as the transmission line from Cahora Bassa, in Mozambique, which had been damaged by flooding in the area, had been repaired, fully restoring its capacity to 1 500 MW.
In its latest biweekly system status bulletin, Eskom did, however, point out that the electricity demand profile was changing as the country moved towards winter.
“The demand for electricity picks up rapidly as we move into the evening when residential customers arrive home from work and switch on stoves, heaters and more lighting is used because it gets darker earlier,” Eskom said.
The power utility reiterated that the power system remained tight, stating that balancing supply and demand was a daily challenge.
“We request customers to keep their electricity use as low as possible to ensure that the demand for supply is met,” Eskom said.
The peak demand for the coming week was forecast at 30 115 MW on Friday, 29 643 MW on Saturday, 30 104 MW on Sunday, 32 873 MW on Monday, 32 170 MW on Tuesday and 30 653 MW on Wednesday.
Eskom also said that it was continuing with its planned maintenance schedule and was scaling it down to prepare for winter while also managing unplanned outages that added more pressure to an already tight system.