JOHANNESBURG, South Africa —
Africa’s most
industrialized economy South Africa is again facing sweeping power cuts, caused
by failures at ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure, the nationalized
utility company said Sunday.
اضافة اعلان
The boss of state-owned Eskom Andre de Ruyter
announced “a high stage of load shedding this week”, using jargon for planned
outages.
On an eight-notch scale of rolling blackouts, the
country has reached the sixth critical stage. Residents and businesses will face several outages of several hours
daily.
Level six was seen in June in the middle of the
southern winter amid an increase in energy consumption and pressure on
production.
The rise in temperature since September with the
arrival of spring usually leads to a drop in consumption, with reduced heating
demand.
Eskom generally takes advantage of the period to
shut down production units for maintenance.
But a high number of breakdowns, 45 in the space of
seven days, led to a dramatic drop in production.
“Stage six load shedding will remain implemented
until sufficient generating units are returned,” Eskom chief operating officer
Jan Oberholzer said.
After years of mismanagement and corruption, the
public company is unable to produce enough energy for the country, which is
regularly plunged into darkness.
Demonstrations against the deterioration of public
services are regularly held.
Urging South Africans to use electricity sparingly,
De Ruyter called for office lights to be extinguished at night, and for
swimming pool pumps and water heaters to be turned off during peak hours.
Developing efficient large-scale generation capacity
“will take time,” the CEO added, adding that the possibility of implementing
permanent load-shedding slots had been considered but ultimately rejected.
South Africa produces 80 percent of its electricity
from coal, creating serious pollution bemoaned by environmentalists.
The country obtained 7.7 billion euros for its
energy transition during COP26.
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