Eskom Extends South Africa Power Cuts Amid Worst Year of Outages
Eskom Extends South Africa Power Cuts Amid Worst Year of Outages
(Bloomberg) -- South Africa’s power utility said it will continue rationing electricity through the weekend, intensifying the span of controlled power cuts in what’s already a record year of outages.
Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., the state-owned monopoly that generates almost all of the nation’s power, increased the severity of nationwide rotational power cuts on Wednesday to Stage 4, which removes 4,000 megawatts from the system to avoid a total collapse of the grid.
The power cuts will continue “throughout the weekend as Eskom teams work around the clock to return as many of these generation units to service as possible,” it said in a statement.
The loss-making utility is battling operational problems, financial issues and relies on government to service 488 billion rand ($29 billion) of debt. Eskom’s poorly maintained generation fleet is prone to breakdowns and it’s already cut the most power since at least 2007, according to a report by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
The utility’s officials told lawmakers in a presentation on Wednesday that the system will be subject to “unreliability and unpredictability” during at least 18 months that the company conducts planned maintenance. That period will require extensive use of turbines that run on costly diesel fuel.
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