Municipalities Won’t Get Away With Ignoring Power Cuts – Eskom

Eskom said municipalities who think they can get away with refusing to cut power to their customers will be dealt with.

The power utility says when some areas refuse to go ahead with the scheduled blackouts, it has an even bigger impact on the country’s strained grid.

The Eskom CEO André de Ruyter said this left the utility with very little choice but to implement stage 4 load shedding.

“During stage 2 load shedding, we saw a number of municipalities either not abiding by the obligations to implement load shedding or implementing it on a fractional basis.”

Power cuts have been lowered to Stage 3 from Wednesday morning following the return of several generation units at power stations.

“We’ve already seen Lethabo unit 1 return so that’s about 600 megawatts. Lethabo 2 is expected to return at around 6 am and that will add another 600 megawatts.”

A number of units are returning to full operation while the utility’s dams are filling up and De Ruyter said the system was set to improve.