Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has apologised after South African households were plunged into darkness for longer hours following the decision to move the country to Stage 6 load shedding.
ELECTRICITY Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has apologised after South African households were plunged into complete darkness for longer hours following the decision to move the country over to Stage 6 load shedding.
“We have gone through a very difficult three days since we had gotten a significant amount of reprieve over the past 21 days and where we have been able to sustain a relatively healthy performance of the units,” Ramokgopa said.
He explained that the decision to ramp up load shedding to Stage 6 was due to the fact that Eskom had experienced a reduction in the available capacity as of Thursday, July 13 and as a result they had to take drastic measures aimed at protecting the grid.
“I really want to express our most sincere and profuse apology for having taken South Africans through a very difficult of intensive load shedding … load shedding is unacceptable. Going through higher stages of load shedding, especially Stage 6 should not become a norm,” he said, adding they were aware that the power outages had disrupted work and lives.
Ramokgopa was speaking at a media briefing in Pretoria where he sought to update the nation on measure that had been taken so far to implement President Cyril Ramaphosa’s energy plan.
The minister also pointed out that while significant gains had been made in reducing load shedding over the past few weeks, the power grid remains vulnerable.
He added government is working towards getting to a stage where it is able to build resilience and create an additional buffer so that there is a sufficient reserve margin that will avoid the power cuts in the future.
He also said the recent adverse weather conditions such as snow in some parts of Gauteng and Mpumalanga played a significant role in customers drawing from the grid and this resulted in an elevated demand on the grid.
“When we resolve load shedding problem, our measure of the degree to which we are able to stand before the public and say load shedding has been resolved, has little do to with summer conditions but everything to do with our ability to be able to meet demand of the 34,000 megawatts, which is essentially the peak we have projected for winter.”
On whether South Africans should expect further high levels of load shedding in the coming weeks, Ramokgopa said Eskom was looking to get an additional 3,000 megawatts over the next few days.
“We might be going into summer periods of course the demand will go down. We are expending the trend-line of generation capacity to improve. We are expecting additional units to come on stream. Our task is in the shortest possible space of time to end load shedding and create additional capacity for the next winter season,” he said.
