Reminder: Here is what happens during Stage 5 load shedding

Much to the dismay of South Africans, Eskom has ramped up load shedding to stage 5, citing further breakdowns. The embattled parastatal said the load shedding would continue for the weekend, at least until Monday, 19 September 2022, at around 05:00.

Many have already had to put up with stage 4 load shedding for much of the week, but what exactly does stage 5 mean and to what extent are Eskom’s customers impacted? During stage 4 load shedding, outages were implemented 12 times over a four day period for two hours at a time. Under stage 5, the blackouts are a tad worse.

WHAT DOES STAGE 5 LOAD SHEDDING MEAN?

Stage 5 load shedding basically means 5000MW of the national load needs to be shed, which translates to approximately 7.5 hours that households may spend without electricity.

The last time the power utility re-introduced stage 5 was in July when some of its staff had embarked on industrial action, which impacted its ability to keep the lights on.

At the same time, Deputy president David Mabuza recently assurred MPs that Eskom would not be privatised, something which had been advocated for by several sectors. Mabuza reckons government’s policy options and positions have not reached the point where privatisation is seen as an answer to providing better solutions to its current problems.

Mabuza added that government is hard at work trying to make Eskom a more efficient and effective energy generation and transmission public entity with the necessary capabilities to ensure the security and consistency of energy supply, in the interest of the economy and human development.

“It would be inaccurate to characterise the current organisational transformation happening within Eskom as privatisation or implied intention to facilitate it. That is not the case. Instead, the utility is currently in an advanced stage of the process of unbundling, which will result in the transformation of the electricity sector in order to achieve long-term energy security for our country. On several occasions, we have addressed the specifics of this plan with this Parliament in our capacity as government,” he said.

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