By: Natasha Archary

Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has promised South Africans a December with lower stages of loadshedding and some loadshedding-free days.
On Sunday, 26 November Ramokgopa briefed media on the current electricity crisis and recent Stage 6 rolling blackouts, refuting that the country is in the grips of Stage 8 power cuts.
“We were never at Stage 8. One of the things that I committed to is that we are going to be transparent, we’ll share with you the honest truth, we were never at Stage 8.
The experiences of people in the various localities, that I cannot deny but remember that responsibility in the incidence of Johannesburg, Eskom has handed it over to City Power.
On the 24th, where we went with regards to intensity of loadshedding, if you look at the unplanned capacity loss factor, that is the rate at which the units are failing plus the partial load losses, we are sitting at about 15 500 MW as we reported on Friday.
So, your major issue was not only unplanned capacity loss factor, really your issue was on the demand, the surge had gone up.”
According to Ramokgopa, 2 more units at Kusile Power Station is the key to giving the country a buffer against more intense levels of loadshedding.
Units 2 and 5 at Kusile are expected to go online at the end of the month and third week in December respectively.
As a result the Electricity Minister says there will be lower stages of loadshedding during the holiday season and promised some loadshedding-free days.
“In relation to the December outlook, what Eskom has done is provide previously their summer outlook, but we know that the following units will come online.
I did make the statement that unit 2 and unit 5, there is an expectation it will come online, and then what we know also about December is that your energy intensive users, your major industries are closing, so you are going to have a demand that is going to dip.
Therefore we should be having significantly lower stages of loadshedding and to some point, there will be days that will not have loadshedding.”
On Sunday, Eskom moved from Stage 6 to Stage 4 loadshedding.
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