Kaya 959 Reporter
Power Utility Eskom’s Chief Operations Officer, Jan Oberholzer has come out to say South Africa could find itself in a very dire situation in the coming weeks.
Speaking at a media briefing on Wednesday, 10 March, he said, if Eskom ran out of diesel and water emergency reserves, the country could find itself at Stage 10 Load shedding.
Oberholzer said the use of emergency electricity generation reserves could force it to implement a further six stages of load-shedding, moving from the current stage 4 to stage 10 power cuts.
“Now, if we run out of diesel at our power stations, it would necessitate a further three stages of load shedding. If on top of that, our dam levels also end up getting depleted, that would lead to an additional three stages of load shedding. Combined, that would mean we’d have to go into a further six stages of load shedding.” said Oberholzer.
Oberholzer said Eskom was currently facing, 15,334MW in unplanned outages; 5,505MW in planned outages; as well as 20,839MW in total outages. He also says we are spending a lot of money to keep the lights on.
“If you look at the finances we are using a lot of money just to keep the system sustainable. Should we run out of diesel then the country would face an additional three stages of load shedding.”
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He gave a very bleak picture of what might potentially happen if the Russia and Ukraine invasion continued. He said that Eskom was currently using nine million litres of diesel a day and that South Africa might run out of diesel reserves.
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