Darkness is looming in some parts of Gauteng after City of Joburg’s power utility City Power announced stage 3 load shedding will start from 5pm on Friday.
This follows a similar announcement from power utility, Eskom, just hours earlier.
Eskom’s Group Chief Executive, Dan Marokane, said load shedding will start at 5pm on Friday evening and will run for the weekend.
This comes hours after the announcement that the National Energy Regulator South Africa had granted Eskom a 12.74% tariff increase for 2025/2026 set to come into effect on April 1.
City Power’s spokesperson Issac Mangena's decision to implement stage 3 load shedding follows Eskom's announcement of the reinstatement of load shedding, citing several breakdowns in their generation fleet.
“In keeping up with regulatory requirements, we will be rolling out load shedding across all areas of our supply, as per the utility's declaration,” he said.
Mangena said the list of blocks of affected suburbs and times would be shared shortly on City Power’s website and digital platforms.
The announcement by Eskom comes after over 300 days of reprieve, which allowed City Power to recover its network fleet and bring most of its plants back to service.
“We understand that load shedding can be disruptive as it usually brings added challenges of unplanned power supply cuts caused by damaged electrical infrastructure and household appliances,” Mangena said.
“Load shedding also exposes our network to prying thieves.”
He called on the customers to use electricity sparingly to avoid causing network overload, which led to the need for load reduction in some areas.
He called on customers to report any suspicious activities around the electricity infrastructure.
Earlier on Friday, IOL News reported that in a statement, Eskom said that after more than 10 months of uninterrupted electricity supply, due to the success of the Generation Recovery Plan, there was a high risk of load shedding at short notice this weekend.
Marokane said: "This is a potentially temporary setback. Load shedding is largely behind us due to the structural improvements in our generation fleet.
"However, over the past seven days, we have experienced several breakdowns that require extended repair times.
"This has necessitated the use of all our emergency reserves, which now need to be replenished.
Marokane said they were closely monitoring the status of its current emergency reserves.
He said up to Stage 4 load shedding may be implemented over the weekend.
Eskom said it would provide further updates.
IOL News