South Africa’s power utility Eskom has resumed scheduled power cuts, citing outages at the Koeberg nuclear power station and the Kusile coal plant.
The power cuts, which will last throughout the weekend, are expected to shed up to 3,000 megawatts (MW) from the national grid.
The outages have resulted in a 2,700 MW shortage in generation capacity over the past 14 hours, prompting Eskom to implement “Stage 3” outages.
The company aims to replenish its emergency reserves by Monday morning.
Eskom has assured that the country is far from returning to the record levels of power cuts experienced in 2023.
However, the intermittent power cuts have been a regular feature of life in South Africa for over a decade.
The power cuts are expected to continue until Monday evening, when Eskom anticipates returning 6,200 MW of capacity to service.
South Africa’s electricity minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, is scheduled to brief reporters on Eskom’s performance on Saturday.
