S.African state utility reinstates rolling power cuts from Monday

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South African state utility Eskom said on Sunday it would resume rolling power cuts from Monday till Wednesday during night-time to attend to unplanned breakdowns and replenish generation capacity.

The beleaguered state utility, which is reliant on aging coal-fired power plants that frequently break down, has been implementing rolling blackouts in the country – locally called load-shedding – for more than a decade.

The crisis has worsened this year with the high cost of diesel and lack of its availability in the international market.

“To the extent possible, Eskom will endeavour to limit load-shedding to night-time to have minimal impact on the economy and population,” the utility said in a statement, adding that it would implement around two hours of power cut from 1600 local time (GMT 1400) till midnight.

“The loadshedding will be used to replenish emergency generation reserves during the night to bolster generation capacity.”

Till mid September, Eskom had already implemented more than 100 days of power cuts with several major cities seeing blackouts of more than six hours lately.

Frequent voltage surges on restoration of power have also led to a multitude of local faults in cables and transformers leaving some localities in the commercial capital Johannesburg without power for days.

Eskom currently has 5487 megawatts (MW) on planned maintenance, while another 14,061 MW of capacity was unavailable due to breakdowns, the company said.

It has around 45000 MW of installed capacity.

(Reporting by Promit Mukherjee;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)