Eskom would like to apologise to the nation for the inconvenience of the past few weeks due to load shedding.

We have communicated for an extended period to South Africa that the power system is extremely constrained and vulnerable.

With the system being tight, any abnormal event pushes us into load shedding

With the reserve margin being low, we do not have enough capacity to meet demand, necessitating the need for planned, controlled and rotational load shedding, to protect the power system from a total country-wide blackout

Over the last few months we have seen a significant increase in unplanned maintenance/breakdowns on our plant (between 5000MW to 9000 MW) that has had a compounding negative effect on power system reliability