CAPE TOWN - Eskom said on Friday it would implement Stage 3 load shedding until 11pm and then scale back to Stage 2 load shedding until 7pm on Saturday.
The utility said it was able to do this because Unit 1 at the Koeberg nuclear plant was due to be synchronised back onto the electricity grid on Saturday morning, a day earlier than expected.
The unit has been out of operation for most of the week due to a fault in its cooling system, caused in part by the ingression of fish. As a result, Eskom resorted to Stage 4 load shedding.
"Koeberg Unit 1 will be synchronised onto the grid tomorrow morning, a day earlier than initially expected. This will help increase generation capacity and ease the scale of load shedding."
On Friday afternoon, unplanned outages countrywide was curtailing electricity capacity by 11,995 megawatts while planned outages due to maintenance took another 4,708 megawatts off the national grid.