Eskom pushes load-shedding to stage 6

In the early hours of Sunday, 23 February 2025, Eskom escalated load-shedding from stage 3 to stage 6, marking a significant deterioration in South Africa’s power supply situation.

“Eskom regrets to announce that stage 6 load-shedding was implemented at 01:30 due to multiple unit trips at Camden Power Station and will continue until further notice,” the power utility stated.

Eskom also explained the abrupt shift to stage 3 load-shedding on Saturday evening, which occurred without prior warning. 

The utility attributed this sudden implementation to multiple unit failures at Majuba Power Station and an additional trip at Medupi. 

These technical setbacks resulted in a substantial loss of 3,864 MW in generation capacity. Furthermore, planned maintenance activities contributed to another 7,506 MW in outages.

“Additionally, to replenish emergency reserves and prepare for the week ahead, stage 6 load-shedding was essential,” Eskom added.

This marks the first time since 10 February 2024 that Eskom has had to resort to stage 6 load-shedding, the most severe level of power cuts it has officially announced to date. 

While Eskom has improved its performance over the last year and managed to keep lights on most of the time, the group’s capacity issues have not fundamentally shifted.

Any setbacks or interruptions risk plunging the country back into darkness.

Nedbank chief economist Nicky Weimar said progress is being made, particularly in the electricity sector, which has received much of the government’s attention. 

After years of declining energy availability factor (EAF), Eskom seems to have turned things around, and the private sector has invested heavily in renewable energy. 

Greater private electricity generation is ultimately the future of South Africa’s energy market, Weimar said, as it will prove cheaper and more efficient. 

However, significant grid capacity constraints limit the potential buildout of new renewable energy projects in South Africa. 

The government has announced a considerable grid expansion project that will cost hundreds of billions of rands and build over 14,000km of transmission lines and hundreds of new substations. 

This buildout presents a big challenge as many of the best areas for renewable energy generation in South Africa are located far from demand centres and existing coal power plants. 

South Africa’s electricity grid was designed to transfer energy created from coal-fired power plants in the northeastern parts of the country to the major demand centre of Gauteng. 

Now, with renewable energy, the main demand centre remains Gauteng, but the areas where electricity is generated will be the Northern Cape, Western Cape, and Eastern Cape. In effect, the country’s electricity grid will have to be flipped. 

Furthermore, Weimar explained that even with these improvements, load-shedding would most likely return to cap economic growth at 1.5% to 2%. 

“We may not have load-shedding right now, but that is in an economy that is growing by 0.5%. We want to grow at over 2%, and if we do, load-shedding will probably come back.”