Pretoria: Cabinet has welcomed an update on Eskom’s ongoing efforts to restore stability to the country’s national power supply, including additional capacity to the grid. This follows unforeseen incidents at multiple power stations that led to the implementation of load shedding that began at the weekend.

According to South African Government News Agency, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni explained during a post-Cabinet briefing on Thursday that the highly unusual and unrelated incidents at the weekend resulted in a rapid depletion of reserve margins. These incidents included an electrical fault at Majuba power station, the loss of cooling water pumps at Camden power station, and unit loss at Medupi power station.

‘Cabinet noted that the upcoming addition of 1,600 megawatts with the synchronisation of Kusile Unit 6 scheduled for 9 March 2025 and Medupi Unit 4 at the end of March 2025 will further bolster our nation’s energy supply,’ Ntshavheni stated. Cabinet also acknowledged the swift response by Eskom’s technical team to recover 4,800 MW with four of the five tripped units at Majuba having returned to the grid and two of four tripped units returned at Camden by 8 pm on Sunday.

Despite the setback, Cabinet has noted that steady progress has been made in improving generation capacity and maintaining a reliable electricity supply. From 1 April 2024 to 20 February 2025, load-shedding was suspended for 323 days, compared to 32 days in the same period last year. Electricity supply was available 99% of the time compared to just 9.8% last year.

Eskom suspended load shedding on Wednesday morning. ‘We maintain our guidance that load shedding is largely behind us due to structural improvements in the generation fleet. Our focus remains on eliminating load shedding as a structural constraint on the economy. There will be valuable lessons to be learned from the set of multiple unit trips that were unconnected and purely technical in nature related to electrical and control system issues within auxiliary parts of our power stations,’ said the utility’s Group Chief Executive, Dan Marokane, in a statement at the time.