Eskom eases load-shedding

South Africa’s state electricity utility reduced outages after the recovery of multiple plants that had failed at the weekend, causing the worst power cuts in 12 months.

Eskom is implementing Stage 4 power cuts — removing 4,000 megawatts from the grid to prevent its collapse — until further notice, it said in a statement on Monday.

On Sunday, it resorted to Stage 6 outages after 10 generation units tripped.

The reduction in outages follows the recovery of all five units at the Majuba power plant, two at Camden and one at Medupi, with two units still offline, Eskom said.

“The return of these units comes after identifying the root causes of multiple unit trips, which were unconnected and purely technical in nature,” it said. “Additionally, emergency-reserves replenishment is progressing well.”