Load shedding continues today at stage 3. Check your Eskom schedule or the Cape Town City schedule depending on your area.
Kieno Kammies speaks to senior general manager for demand management at Eskom Andrew Etzinger about the latest situation at Eskom. He says the maintenance issues on certain power stations had not been attended to timeously.
He says another seven generators had to be taken offline to have urgent problems attended to, and so Eskom moved from stage 2 to stage 4 during the course of the day.
That situation persisted until last night. Overnight we managed to get four of the generators back and we expect another two back during the course of this morning.
But due to deficit issues, Eskom will still need to implement stage 3 from 8am.
We've pulled it back from stage 4 and we are pushing very hard to bring it down to lower stages.
Eskom has spent over R400 billion on building new power stations and they are not delivering what they should.
Getting Kusile and Medupi up and running is our top priority. As soon as they come online and are completely reliable we are out of the woods.
Etzinger acknowledges there are massive numbers of contractual disputes on the projects but says "that is normal for a mega project, that's the way these projects work."
He says there are supply and design issues that need to be corrected.
He also agreed that there are some concerns regarding contractor Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Africa.
I would want another contractor to work alongside Hitachi. We are in a number of negotiations to find out who's fault it is... I wouldn't single out Hitachi on its own.
He reiterated the damage caused by the state capture project.
Etzinger says the work done in December has helped and without that the situation currently would be worse.