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Eskom is progressing well with the maintenance of its power generating plant whilst supplying the country’s electricity needs.

Many people have mistakenly perceived recent power outages in many parts of the country, especially in Gauteng, as being load shedding. However, this is not true as Eskom has not implemented load shedding for more than 10 months, except for 2 hours and 20 minutes. We will inform our customers, including municipalities and the general public, before implementing load shedding.

By far the most common type of power outages or supply interruptions is caused by issues on the local distribution grid.  This is not caused by a national shortage of capacity but by some local fault, normally at the distribution level. It could be due to cable theft, overloading of the local system (resulting in a protection breaker tripping), equipment failure or system maintenance.

Due to the nature of an electrical network, power outages can occur at any time. Eskom has technical teams on standby in the event that a local power outage occurs. The intention is to minimise the incidents of faults and to shorten restoration times.  Eskom’s planned maintenance of its distribution network is ongoing and we will advise our customers directly when any maintenance is to be done in their areas.

While the vast majority of customers get their supply from the distribution system, some very large customers (such as smelters) are connected directly to the national grid.  Your distribution supplier is the person who sends you a monthly electricity bill, or from whom you buy electricity prepayment vouchers. It will either be your local municipality or Eskom.

Customers supplied by Eskom are encouraged to report all electricity outages to 0860037566 or 08600ESKOM and can obtain information on the status of supply on our website www.eskom.co.za. Those supplied by a municipality should contact the relevant municipality directly.

We also call upon communities to refrain from connecting themselves illegally, to use electricity sparingly and stop buying electricity from ghost vendors. It is also important for communities to support our efforts towards infrastructure upgrades and the smart meter programme so as to ensure that we can accelerate the overall service level improvement.

We will continue to provide regular updates on the state of the power system through various media platforms.

Issued by Eskom