LOAD-SHEDDING should ease over the coming days and the nation’s electricity supply will continue to improve over the medium term as new investments bolster generation, according to Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan.
“We will have load-shedding for a while in South Africa,” Gordhan said on Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. But “not of the order that we’ve seen in the recent past,” he said.
Eskom, which supplies more than 90% of the nation’s power, cut 6 000 MW of power from the national grid over the weekend, leaving businesses and homes without electricity for more than four hours at a stretch.
Energy shortages date back to 2008 but the problem has become increasingly acute, with outages reaching a record this year as more than half of the utility’s capacity was taken off line at times due to breakdowns and maintenance work.
South Africa should have built additional capacity almost two decades ago and now needs “massive investment” in energy infrastructure,
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