Load Shedding is likely to hit South Africa in the coming winter since South Africa recorded power outages last week.
The Bureau for Economic Research (BER) issued a research note that mentioned that South Africa hit a new record of 22 000MW of generation capacity unavailable last week.
“Worryingly, in its assessment for the winter period, Eskom anticipates between 37-101 days of load-shedding, the latter in an extreme scenario, if it can import unplanned breakdowns to below 12 500 MW it could avoid load shedding,” BER said.
While the exact economic impact of load shedding is hard to quantify the western cape government estimates that load shedding costs South Africa’s economy R500 million per stage per day and the western cape’s economy R75 million per stage per day.
The power utility warned that the country could have more than 100 days of electricity blackouts this year because of outages.
“We have this tool (load Shedding ) at our disposal. We have significant buffer capacity in the load shedding system before we approximate even close to a total system blackout. We still do have headroom in the system to allow us to avoid a total blackout,” BER announced.
Eskom urged South Africans to reduce their power use as the electricity system is severely constrained due to the delay in returning units to service and the loss of multiple generation units on Monday.
