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Johannesburg - Eskom CEO Tshediso Matona said on Monday that although he knows the public does not take kindly to load shedding, the power utility had to choose the lesser of two evils and rather load shed over weekends than during the week.
"It really pains us to have to load shed," he told a media briefing on the state of the power system following the recent spate of load shedding.
Matona said Eskom is load shedding out of responsibility for the grid and a complete blackout is not an option. "A complete blackout will be an extremely catastrophic event and will take weeks to solve. It is too ghastly to comprehend."
He said Eskom's aim is to "retreat from the brink of disaster".
He said the major reason for the outages is because many of Eskom's plants are down. "Plant availability has negatively decreased from 85% to 75% over the last five years", he said adding that the plants were "run hard" during the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
"This has come back to haunt us,” Matona told the briefing.
He said that capacity had been constrained over the years and during 2010 Eskom had to keep the lights on, which hampered them from doing proper maintenance.
"For as long as we have these old plants and money constraints we will live with the risk of a constrained system," he said.
READ: LIVE: Eskom load shedding briefing
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