Eskom announces stage two loadshedding from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning

Eskom announced on Wednesday evening that stage 2 loadshedding would be implemented from 21:00 on Wednesday evening to 08:00 on Thursday morning.

This is not the first bout of outages to hit South Africa on Wednesday. Eskom ended loadshedding in the early morning hours to accommodate the matric results announcement.  

• Subscribe to Fin24’s newsletter here 

In a statement, Eskom said the power system remained vulnerable and unpredictable with breakdowns hitting 13,543 MW at 16:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

"In order to minimise the impact of loadshedding on South Africans, loadshedding is scheduled at night to maximise electricity availability during the working day," the statement said.

• READ: Loadshedding hit manufacturing in December - but SA could still avoid recession

The statement said as a result of the loss of additional generation capacity, emergency reserves were significantly used up on Wednesday.

Eskom said the additional capacity needed to be replenished in order to meet the country's electricity needs for Thursday.

Unplanned outages above 9 500 MW mean Eskom has to resort to emergency power generation by using open cycle gas turbines and pumped-storage hydroelectric plants. These are very expensive ways of generating power, particularly the gas turbines, which require large quantities of diesel.