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Owing to an unanticipated conveyor belt failure at Medupi power station, the system is currently severely constrained and vulnerable. While a number of units are being brought back on line following repairs and maintenance, it is essential to implement Stage 2 loadshedding tonight from 22:00 until 08:00 tomorrow (Sunday). This is in order to help us replenish both our water levels at pumped storage schemes and diesel for our open cycle gas turbines in order to create adequate reserve capacity to place us in a better position to stabilise for the week ahead as South Africa returns to work.

Our teams continue to work tirelessly to return units back from planned and unplanned outages. Owing to inadequate maintenance over a number of years, the system remains vulnerable to unplanned outages. We however remind customers that loadshedding is an essential and controlled measure to ensure continuity of supply.

We will give South Africans regular updates during the course of the day tomorrow about our prognosis for the day and our recovery efforts for the week ahead.

We continue to ask customers to reduce demand as a concerted collective effort can help to avoid or reduce the level of loadshedding.

Eskom customers can check their loadshedding schedules on the Eskom website (loadshedding.eskom.co.za) or through the customer contact centre on 0860037566.

Issued by Eskom