Eskom officially suspended load-shedding on Tuesday after a material reduction in the level of unplanned outages across its coal fleet, which fell to below 12 000 MW after having surged to about 16 000 MW on Monday.

Planned outages of just over 5 000 MW were being implemented as of Tuesday afternoon.

CEO Andre de Ruyter attributed the recovery to the hard work of its generation managers and employees and said that the improvement demonstrated what was possible when there was focus and when individuals “put shoulder to the wheel”.

A day earlier, De Ruyter expressed his dissatisfaction with the performance of certain power station general managers and announced that “consequence management” would be instituted.

By Tuesday, Eskom appeared to have softened its stance somewhat with generation group executive Phillip Dukashe indicating that the focus currently was on taking “corrective action”, which could include “consequence management”.

“Where we identify deficiencies and where we identify that leadership did not act in a way that we would have expected . . . corrective action will certainly be taken.”

Dukashe also confirmed that corrective action would be implemented across several power stations and not only at Majuba, which came close to halting generation altogether on Sunday after problems arose in moving coal to the bunkers.

He also reported that a unit at Duvha, which was not producing any electricity on Monday, was now producing electricity and that a second unit was scheduled to be added overnight.

Two of the three commercial units at Kusile were producing electricity again by Tuesday evening, while a third had been synchronised during the course of the afternoon but had tripped again ahead of the briefing held at 17:00 to update the media on the state of the system.

COO Jan Oberholzer said that the pumped storage upper dams and diesel stocks had been replenished, albeit at a slower pace than had initially been planned.

“[On Wednesday] we will need to be extremely careful and pace the way in which we utilise our emergencies, because we are not expecting any further coal units to return to service tomorrow,” Oberholzer said, referring to the pumped-storage and diesel plants.

He said every effort would be made to ensure uninterrupted electricity supply on Thursday night, when President Cyril Ramaphosa was scheduled to deliver his State of the Nation Address at the Cape Town City Hall, after a fire caused serious damage to Parliament in January.