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No more load shedding for now

Cape Town - South Africa is to be spared blackouts for the moment as no further load shedding is anticipated for the day, an Eskom spokesperson said on Monday.

The Western Cape government said in a tweet: "Good news: Eskom has confirmed that they have suspended load shedding today (Monday)." According to the tweet, this was thanks to overnight plans to deliver more coal.

Earlier the power utility said South Africans could be faced with severe outages for the week ahead after a coal silo collapsed at Eskom's Majuba power station in Mpumalanga on Sunday.

The Democratic Alliance claimed poor maintenance and a lack of quality control caused the crack in the silo.

"This is a direct result of Eskom's deficient maintenance and planning and the public enterprise ministry's lack of quality control measures over Eskom," DA MP Natasha Michael said in a statement.

Michael intended writing to Public Enterprises Minister Lynne Brown to ask for a detailed timeline for maintenance on all the country's power stations, to avoid such failures.

The countrywide blackouts should have been a last resort.

She called on Brown to give a full briefing on Eskom's current capacity constraints to parliament.

Solidarity said Eskom had been warned about skills shortages and an exodus of experts from the company for years.

"Those warnings fell on deaf ears," the trade union's energy industry head Deon Reyneke said in a statement.

"The time has arrived for Eskom to answer for its reluctance to address these issues."

Solidarity would ask Eskom to conduct a survey of its skills pool to address the shortcomings.

At least four cities across the country had to contending with power cuts on Sunday and Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth have been warned of rolling blackouts after Eskom lost 1 800 MW when the silo cracked and collapsed.

The outages could last the rest of the week, Eskom warned.

Fin24 users have voiced strong opinions on the subject. Antoinette Potgieter said her area was kept in the dark from 14h00 to 22h00 on Sunday, but Sandton was not affected.

"Could see all their lights burning. Is it because all the MPs live there?"

User Nikita Nankoo said: "This load shedding is ridiculous! Some of us are in the middle of writing university exams and now studying at night becomes a problem. It's rather unfair especially since we pay such high costs for the electricity."

The new stations have already been paid for and a cracking of that magniture beforehand clearly show people aren't doing their jobs, said Nankoo.

Gustav Erlank said it is disturbing that the system has so little redundancy - a fact he feels almost defies gravity itself. "This is totally ridiculous - how can the whole country be affected by one silo that collapses? Is this how feeble the system has become?"

The overall cost to the economy must be enormous, said Erlank. "The public should probably take note that it's future is in the hands of either a very incompetent or callous leadership."

A user who did not provide his name said succintly: "If the maintenance crews did their jobs properly, this may not have happened." 

Robert Burger echoed this sentiment: "Sorry to say this is lack of maintenance."

Leon Liebenberg said: "This is rubbish. It is not loading sheddings but power failure or power cuts due to lack of or no maintenance." Johan Viljoen added: "Poor and no maintenance."

However, some looked on the bright side. Maud said in her two years of living in Cape Town, she had never experienced a blackout. This did not affect her badly: "First this allowed us to explain one more time to our children that energy is to be spared whenever possible, that our consumption is always increasing due to our way of life and that we must be very careful with it."

And as an added bonus, the family looked at the stars and "I must say: Cape Town in the dark... How romantic!"

 - Fin24

- Are you affected? Send us your stories and photos.


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