Spokesperson Dikatso Mothae said that technical teams were doing planned maintenance to minimise unplanned outages.
“The system is already quite constrained. Our unplanned outages or breakdowns are sitting at over 13,000MW. When we generally speak about being able to limit the load shedding, we say if we can contain those unplanned outages or breakdowns to below 9,500MW, then the risk of load shedding is quite low.”
Plant breakdowns were at 13 471 MW at 06:00 on Wednesday, a slight improvement from 13 600 MW reported on Tuesday morning.
“The power system remains vulnerable. While we were able to replenish water levels at the pumped storage schemes overnight we are currently using these emergency resources including diesel to meet demand today,” Eskom said.
“In the event we lose other generation units or are unable to bring back those that were out for maintenance, load shedding may be implemented earlier in the day,” the power utility warned.
