South African state power utility company, Eskom, on Monday night resumed rolling power cuts to attend to unplanned breakdowns and replenish generation capacity.
The night power outage will end on Wednesday, 12th October, 2022.
The beleaguered state utility, which is reliant on ageing coal-fired power plants that frequently break down, has been implementing rolling blackouts, locally called load-shedding in the country, for more than a decade.
The crisis has worsened this year with the high cost of diesel and the lack of availability of the product in the international market.
“To the extent possible, Eskom will endeavour to limit load-shedding to night-time to have minimal impact on the economy and population,” the utility said in a statement, adding that it would implement around two hours of power cut from 1600 local time (GMT 1400) till midnight.
“The load shedding should be used to replenish emergency generation reserves during the night to bolster generation capacity.”
Till mid-September, Eskom had already implemented more than 100 days of power cuts with several major cities seeing blackouts for more than six hours lately.
Frequent voltage surges on the restoration of power have also led to a multitude of local faults in cables and transformers, leaving some localities in the commercial capital, Johannesburg, without power for days.
Eskom currently has 5487 megawatts (MW) on planned maintenance, while another 14,061MW of capacity was unavailable due to breakdowns, the company said.
It has around 45000MW of installed capacity.