South Africa suffers 100th day of power blackouts this year
South Africa’s State-owned power utility has implemented power cuts on 100 days in 2022, with more to come.
Eskom Holdings ramped up outages to so-called Stage 4 load-shedding, where it removes 4 000 MW from the grid, on Tuesday after three generation units at its Kendal coal-fired station about 100 km east of Johannesburg tripped. The utility expects to reduce this to 2 000 MWfrom Thursday until the end of the week. That will bring the total days of outages in the third quarter to 40, Bloomberg calculations show.
Eskom is struggling to meet electricity demand because its old and poorly maintained power stations continually break down. The energy shortages are weighing on business confidence and output, and contributed to a 0.7% quarter-on-quarter contraction in the economy in the three months through June.
President Cyril Ramaphosa announced steps in July to encourage private power generation to supplement supply from renewable sources. Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer has warned that these plans may not deliver results for the next 12 months or so.
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