(Reuters) -South Africa’s Eskom will suspend scheduled power cuts at 2200 local time (2000 GMT), it said on Friday, after a week of severe power outages owing to faults at its coal-fired power stations.
Economic growth in Africa’s most industrialised nation has been constrained by Eskom’s electricity outages for more than a decade.
Eskom said in a statement that it expected to return to service nine generation units during the weekend, but it warned that the power system remained severely constrained and volatile. “During next week we anticipate to continue relying on the use of emergency reserves to meet demand,” it said.
Eskom’s ageing fleet of coal-fired power plants are highly prone to faults, and government plans to add additional capacity to the national grid have been sluggish.
At their peak this week the power cuts reached “Stage 4,” requiring up to 4,000 megawatts to be shed from the grid, although they were scaled back to “Stage 2” from Thursday evening.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government has tried to reform Eskom to make it more efficient, but progress has been slow.
This week’s power cuts were one factor contributing to a steep decline in the rand, as they highlighted obstacles to growth.
(Reporting by Bhargav Acharya in BengaluruEditing by Alexander Winning and David Goodman)
