Eskom’s electricity generating capacity has reached record lows over the last week, with unplanned power outages reaching their highest level for the year on 3 May, and yesterday coming precariously close to that figure again. Considering winter’s only just begun, this is going to cause some major worries across the country.

Eskom’s own benchmark is to have a maximum of 3 600 Megawatts (MW) offline at any time in unplanned maintenance. But on 10 May (yesterday) there was a shortfall of 5 037 MW – very near the worst outage of 2012 on May 3, when there was an outage to the tune of 5 776 MW.

Increased demand for electricity in the cooler weather has been cited for Eskom’s capacity problems. As winter progresses, this demand will continue to escalate.

The power supplier has recently begun reporting twice a week on the country’s electricity supply in a bid to provide more regular and transparent communication on the power system. It predicts that South Africa’s electricity supplies will be constrained for at least the next two years.

[Source: IOL]