Eskom announced yesterday morning that it would suspend load shedding at 4pm for two hours to ease traffic congestion as people returned home from work.
But just hours later, the embattled power utility did a U-turn, saying it was forced by further outages and increased power demand to abandon plans to interrupt load shedding during rush hour traffic.
Eskom said in a “pilot programme” it had interrupted load shedding at 6am yesterday morning and resumed it at 9am, to allow for ease of traffic during the morning commute to work.
Later, the power utility said: “Eskom will continue implementing Stage 2 load shedding throughout this afternoon.
“Due to higher than projected demand, and because some generating units were not able to return to service as expected, there will be no
respite in load shedding during the peak traffic hours of Tuesday afternoon.”
It said it was already using emergency reserves to supplement capacity.
“Unplanned outages or breakdowns were at 11 770 megawatt as at 1.30pm this afternoon, in addition to generating units that are currently out on planned maintenance.
“Critical maintenance is being done to units that are currently on planned outages, as well as some of those on unplanned outages to ensure timeous return to service.”
The country has been experiencing Stage 2 load shedding, which is expected until Thursday.
Eskom confirmed last week that it would need to implement load shedding for the next 18 months because its generating capacity was severely constrained.