South Africa’s electricity supply system was expected to be “extremely tight” on Monday during the evening peak, after which it was expected to be stable over this period for the rest of the week, owing to lower demand as a result of the public holiday for the national elections on Wednesday, State-owned power utility Eskom said. 

In its latest biweekly system status bulletin, Eskom said the capacity available to meet Monday evening’s demand was 33 200 MW, while the demand was forecast at 32 771 MW.

The demand for the rest of the week was forecast at 31 633 MW on Tuesday, 30 245 MW on Wednesday, 32 365 MW on Thursday, 31 500 MW on Friday, 30 281 MW on Saturday and 29 726 MW on Sunday. 

Eskom further pointed out that the electricity demand profile was changing as the country moved towards winter.

“The demand for electricity picks up rapidly as we move into the evening when residential customers arrive home from work and switch on stoves, heaters and more lighting is used because it gets darker earlier,” Eskom said.

The utility reiterated its call to all customers to “pull together” over the next few months and use electricity sparingly.

“We request all electricity customers to save at least 10% of their electricity usage and sustain these savings,” Eskom said.

The utility also confirmed that it was continuing with its planned maintenance schedule and was scaling it down to prepare for winter while also managing unplanned outages that added more pressure on an already tight system.

Meanwhile, Eskom last week reported that it had experienced an apparent over pressurisation incident on the boiler of Unit 3 at its Duvha power station, in Mpumalanga, stating that the incident would add more pressure to an already tight system.

“However, there is no immediate risk of load shedding,” Eskom said.

The power utility added that the reason for the over pressurisation was being investigated, with the full implications of the incident to be reported once the information was available.