- Stage 3 load shedding is back after power plants lost 2700MW of power in just 14 hours.
- Eskom says they need the weekend to fill up emergency power supplies and do maintenance.
South Africans face more power cuts after Eskom announced Stage 3 load shedding from 2 pm on Friday until 5 am on Monday.
The power cuts come after Eskom lost 2,700 MW of power in the past 14 hours. This happened when Koeberg Unit 2 went offline after being fixed on Wednesday. Bad weather also caused problems at two Kusile power stations.
Eskom Group Executive for Generation, Bheki Nxumalo, said they are working hard to fix broken power stations.
“We have had some delays in returning units that previously tripped back to the grid, as well as the return of three units that have been on a longer-term outage that will bring back 2,500 MW to the grid, which will happen over the coming weeks,” he said.
Eskom Group Chief Executive, Dan Marokane, apologised to South Africans. “Load shedding is a painful reminder of the past, and situations such as this drive our resolve to double down and stay the course to end load shedding,” he said.
He added that things are better than last year. From 1 April 2024 to 27 February 2025, there were 325 days without load shedding, compared to just 32 days in the same period last year.
Eskom expects to fix about 6,200 MW worth of broken power stations by Monday evening. The power utility will keep checking the situation and inform the public if anything changes.
Pictured above: Eskom power station.
Image source: File
