Stage 3 load shedding across South Africa this weekend — power station 'boiler tube failures'

Within hours of Eskom’s “high risk of load shedding” alert, the power utility announced in a media briefing that the country would face Stage 3 load shedding from 5pm on Friday, 31 January 2025, for the weekend and possibly during next week. 

Rolling blackouts will run throughout the weekend, with the primary objective to build the reserves that Eskom relied on extensively since the beginning of this week. This follows several breakdowns at six units, including at Matimba and Lethabo power stations. 

Eskom CEO Dan Marokane said there were multiple unit trips at two big stations earlier in the week. He said they were well on track in getting these units back into operation and added that they would be coming through over the weekend and early in the new week. 

“What we saw, despite the fact that our unplanned losses of just over 13,000 megawatts, is the fact that come next week, as the demand picks up, we will not be having any reserves if we do not create some [room] for ourselves over this weekend,” Marokane said. 

He added that from a generation recovery plan, the issue of trips of units and of tackling unreliability was recognised as a factor that Eskom had to deal with to improve reliability on the back of maintenance activities.

“Our overall availability is still high, but we need to create this space for unexpected breakdowns, as they do happen,” Marokane said.

Marokane confirmed that this was an operational matter and that “this has nothing to do with any other thing”.

Boiler tube failures 

Head of Generation at Eskom, Bheki Nxumalo, said that the incident at Lethabo was unusual and difficult as three units came off on one day, because of boiler tube failures. Eskom has started on repairs, with the first unit expected to be back online tomorrow. 

For the other units, Nxumalo said they would be working from Friday night and up to Monday and Tuesday to return those to power.

At Matimba, one unit was back online on Friday morning, but still other units needed to be returned over the weekend.

These are the two big power stations affected, with six units between them which are offline, with 600 MW. There are also some units at Kendal and Kriel power stations that are offline and Nxumalo should be returned online over the weekend.

“This week was mostly the boiler tube failures. We have a program in Eskom that deals with this. We are working with our main OEMs on the boilers to understand the risk of failures,” Nxumalo said.

Read more: How South Africans fought and won against the devastating 36% Eskom increase bid

Just before the first Eskom alert, Marokane said in a parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Electricity and Energy this morning that they would be issuing the alert for a high risk of load shedding this weekend as Eskom attempts to replenish reserves after unit trips this week.

“Consistent with the messaging we’ve said before that during the summer plan, to the extent that the unplanned outages exceed a particular level, ie. the number of breakdowns gets a little bit out of control, we may have to revert to load shedding to protect the system and the system integrity.

“This week has been quite tough… We’ve had multiple unit trips at two big stations early in the week, and we are busy trying to get those back online over the weekend,” Marokane said. 

The CEO said that Eskom has had to rely on its reserves to keep going after these unit trips, but that these reserves needed to be replenished over the weekend.

“We’ve always understood that this risk may happen and we need to manage them appropriately. We do so, still firmly on our path towards a point of comfort, as the minister said that at some point, we’ll then announce that we have sufficient capacity returned and brought back at the build programs to ensure that we can absorb these kinds of shocks. But we are at that point,” Marokane said. 

A day after the tariff ruling...

With load shedding being implemented just a day after the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) ruled against Eskom’s application for a 36% increase in electricity tariffs for the 2025/2026 financial year, Ramakgopa said that he was on the sides of both Nersa and Eskom.

Ramakgopa said Nersa was confronted with a very delicate balancing act. To protect the interests of Eskom and ensure it could generate enough cash to reinvest in its operations, as well as the billions needed for its generation, transmission and distribution. 

Then on the other side, it also had to balance the interests of the consumer at both household and industry to meet their own daily needs. 

Before this weekend, the country experienced 10 months of uninterrupted electricity supply. According to Ramakgopa, they were still on track to completely eradicate load shedding.

“I’ve made the point that we are within touching distance of the resolution of load shedding… At the point that we have resolved load shedding, I and the chair of the board will address the country and say, we have resolved load shedding, and I said that we were on the right track,” Ramakgopa said.

The minister said from the point of view of reducing unplanned losses, capacity loss factor, bringing down the rate at which the units were failing, addressing the partial load losses, and investing in planned maintenance, that the trend line in all of these was positive. DM