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Eskom has announced Stage 2 loadshedding.
Energy expert, Professor Vally Padayachee says Eskom’s implementation of stage 2 rolling blackouts paints a bleak picture for its winter outlook.
Last week, the power utility promised to keep the lights on, saying that the national electricity grid was stable. It said sufficient emergency reserves would manage periods of high demand in winter.
Eskom, however, said that should electricity demand increase, stages one and two rolling blackouts may be implemented.
Eskom will implement #Stage2 loadshedding during evening peak periods from today at 16:00 until 22:00 on Thursday to ensure supply during working days pic.twitter.com/voim40qFLL
— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) May 13, 2025
The current stage two rolling blackouts during evening peak periods from four pm to 10pm are expected to last until Thursday.
#Eskom CEO Dan Marokane says the current stage 2 of #Loadshedding will continue with the utility doing midday assessments ahead of the evening peak periods at 16:00 to manage limited generation capacity and ensure a stable supply during working days #SABCNews pic.twitter.com/MjurXbtZTW
— Katlego Legodi (@KatlegoLegodi_) May 14, 2025
Padayachee says he’s surprised that there are rolling blackouts shortly after Eskom announced its latest power system update and 2025 winter outlook.
“Eskom did allude to, in their winter plan briefing, that they would get into load shedding, but my take on it was that it would have been more of an exception than the rule. So, the prognosis from this situation, if you just analyse what they’ve said in the alert, they are reflecting about 16,000 to 17,000 megawatts of units that have come back from planned maintenance or forced outages and have broken down again. So, the prognosis means that if this happens in the middle of May then it does not all go well if we get into the middle of winter, which is the end of June, July.”
Status of South Africa’s electricity generation performance
