By Sfundo Parakozov
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) -South African businesses and households were hit by scheduled power cuts for the first time in 10 months on Friday due to breakdowns at state power utility Eskom’s coal-fired power stations.
Energy minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa told reporters that Eskom had depleted its reserves and would implement “Stage 3” power cuts, requiring up to 3,000 megawatts of capacity to be shed from the national grid.
An Eskom executive said six units had gone offline at two of the company’s best-performing coal stations, Lethabo and Matimba, amounting to about 3,600 MW of capacity.
The outages started at 5 p.m. (1500 GMT) on Friday and will last until at least midnight on Sunday.
“We got hit by a perfect storm,” Ramokgopa said, referring to the breakdowns happening when a number of units were offline for maintenance.
The minister described the return of power cuts in Africa’s most industrialised economy as a “temporary setback” and said the country was still within reach of ending electricity outages.
Power cuts have been a drag on South Africa’s economic growth for more than a decade, but there had been none since March last year after a sudden turnaround in the performance of Eskom’s generation fleet.
Eskom said last month that it expected to post its first annual profit in eight years, helped by improved power supply and a debt relief package from the government.
However, in a potential setback for its turnaround efforts, South Africa’s energy regulator awarded it an average tariff increase of 12.7% on Thursday for the financial year that starts in April, roughly a third of what it had asked for.
The regulator’s decision effectively denies Eskom tens of billions of rand that the company said it needs to deal with coal contracts, a higher carbon tax and rising debt from municipalities.
(Additional reporting by Tannur Anders and Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Alexander Winning, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Jan Harvey)
