Three days of loadshedding announced for South Africa

Eskom has announced Stage 2 loadshedding through the weekend, with power outages starting at 12pm on Friday, 5 February.

The power utility made the announcement on its social media channels on Friday morning. Loadshedding will last until 11pm on Sunday night.

Eskom said that heavy rains resulted in the need for rolling blackouts.

#POWERALERT1

Eskom to implement Stage 2 #loadshedding from 12:00 until Sunday at 23:00 pic.twitter.com/MhRsOPymUO

— Eskom Hld SOC Ltd (@Eskom_SA) February 5, 2021

This resulted in the shutdown of five generating units at Medupi. The units did not receive coal due to the heavy rains.

“Eskom has implemented contingency plans and deployed additional resources to deal with the heavy rainfalls in the Mpumalanga and Limpopo areas,” Eskom said.

Meanwhile, the City of Cape Town has said that municipality-supplied customers will experience Stage 1 loadshedding.

Following Eskom's announcement of load-shedding, the City will protect its customers this weekend.

City-supplied customers will be on Stage 1 while Eskom-supplied customers will be on Stage 2 between 12:00 today, 5 February 2021, and Sunday evening.#CTInfo pic.twitter.com/mvmwhPitYS

— City of Cape Town (@CityofCT) February 5, 2021

Feature image: Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Read more: Apps and tools to help you keep track of your loadshedding schedule and stages