Stage-6 load shedding

“This is due to the unlawful and unprotected labour action, which has caused widespread disruption to Eskom's power plants,” the utility said in a statement.

This, however, is still insufficient to stave off the implementation of stage-6 load shedding for this evening and tomorrow evening,” the utility said. Stage-6 load shedding will again be implemented from 4pm to 10pm on Wednesday. Tuesday’s stage-6 load shedding will run for at least six hours, from 4pm to 10pm.

This comes after CEO Andre de Ruyter said the grid was under pressure as the strike by some of its staff continued at power plants.

Load shedding 6 will then again be implemented at 4 pm – 10 pm tomorrow evening.” Stage 4 load shedding will then be implemented at 10 pm – midnight. From 5 am until 4 pm on Wednesday load shedding will be implemented at stage 4.

The City of Cape Town says it has been building energy reserves in an effort to help reduce the impact of higher stages of Eskom's load shedding.

In the meantime, we are doing everything in our power to assist our customers and we thank them for their support.” Needless to say, stage 6 load shedding will have a profound impact on Cape Town and we are working to make sure the impact is reduced as far as possible by offering some protection from the higher stages of load shedding,” said mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis. “Much work is already underway with this goal in mind – in the City’s own build, small-scale embedded generation, wheeling and independent power producer programmes.

Such severe power cuts would put SA in the same position as Gaza. If power utility Eskom were to implement a full day of Stage 6 load shedding, South Africans ...

Some of these cuts would join together into blocks – meaning the power could be out for a total of 4.5 hours at a time. A resident of Durban, meanwhile, would face four outages a day on average. And while the sabotage did not directly cause the Stage 6 cuts, it "added to many other problems". At the time, the utility said that heavy rain and floods at a number of power plants had caused havoc. Were Stage 6 to continue for a whole month, SA firms would be facing more than 120 outages per month. Users would then face more load shedding when Stage 4 cuts are implemented from 22:00 until midnight.