South Africa:Eskom rings in the New Year by returning to load shedding

Eskom has announced that load shedding will alternate between Stages 2 and 3 from Tuesday until further notice. 

Stage 2 will start at 05:00 on Tuesday, and last until 16:00, when Stage 3 will kick in until 05:00 the next morning. The cycle is expected to continue in that fashion. 

"With the current intensified maintenance aimed at improving the fleet performance, we had a setback of three generating units (2 148MW) not coming back online as anticipated," the utility said on Monday. 

Eskom said this setback "coupled with a loss of six generating units (3 113MW), and a projected increase in electricity demand", resulted in the return of load shedding. 

This ends an 18-day streak without load shedding.