There is a small chance that South Africans may be impacted by load-shedding this week, as struggling power utility Eskom continues to battle unplanned outages. 

In an electricity status update on Monday morning, the power producer said unplanned outages at generation units were just below 9 500MW, about a fifth of its nominal capacity. 

"The probability of load-shedding is low for [Monday] and the rest of the week, but should there be a significant shift on the system we may need to load shed at short notice," it said. It added there was currently sufficient diesel for its open cycle gas turbines and water for use by pumped storage schemes to supplement the capacity constraints, if required. 

However it warned that unexpected shifts, such as further generation unit breakdowns, the unavailability of diesel or low water levels could result in rotational power cuts.