Infographic: Eskom Struggles To Keep Up With Peak Demand

Eskom implemented Stage 2 loadshedding on Wednesday evening after announcing that the power utility had lost five generating units. The latest data from Eskom shows that the power utility struggled to keep up with electricity demand during the peak hours of Tuesday evening, having only 285.5 megawatts of capacity left.

Eskom publishes the hourly demand and supply data that shows how they are able to match South Africas electricity demand throughout the day.

In the previous few days, Eskom had managed to have a cushion of around 2 000 megawatts left of available demand, which waned on Monday at 1 400 megawatts, and crashed to just 285 megawatts on Tuesday evening.

This comes amid Eskom promising to share their plan for reducing load shedding this winter.

Our first prize as Eskom is not to have load shedding but we will share with the country. Winter is at least better than the summer months because we don't have rains, thunderstorms and all of these things, because as you've seen our operations, some of them are outside. So, if there are thunderstorms the whole day, it means these people, we need to look after their safety. So, we only have to deal with the cold and our plan still seems to like cold weather as well. So, they seem to perform much better in the winter.