South Africa's struggling state power utility Eskom said it would implement scheduled power cuts from Thursday evening to replenish emergency generation reserves.
The "stage 2" power cuts, which requires up to 2,000 megawatts of capacity to be shed from the national grid, will be implemented from 9 p.m. local time on Thursday until 5 a.m. on Friday, and again from Friday at 9 p.m. until Saturday at 5 a.m.
"Should the emergency generation reserves not recover sufficiently, it may be necessary to continue load-shedding during the day and over the weekend," Eskom said in a statement, adding it last implemented scheduled outages in July.