Cape Town - Power utility Eskom announced it will be moving load shedding to Stage 3 from Thursday at 9pm.
Thereafter, Stage 2 will be implemented from Friday at 5am until at least Monday.
This comes after the country has been experiencing rolling Stage 4 load shedding blackouts since Wednesday.
“Due to some recovery in generation capacity over the past 24 hours, load shedding will be reduced to Stage 3 from 9pm until 5am on Friday. Thereafter load shedding will be lowered to Stage 2 until 5am on Monday morning, as previously communicated,” said Eskom.
The power utility has appealed to all South Africans to continue to reduce the usage of electricity by switching off all non-essential items in order to limit the impact of load shedding.
It said the reason for downgrading its load shedding stage was due to generation units returning to service.
“The emergency generation reserves have sufficiently improved to permit a reduction in the stage of load shedding.
“A generation unit each at Matla, Medupi, Kusile and Camden power stations have returned to service while a unit each at Matla, Lethabo and Arnot power stations were taken off-line for repairs during the same period.
“Two other units are expected to return to service today while another five generation units are expected to be back in service by Monday afternoon,” Eskom said.
The total breakdowns amount to 13 942MW while planned maintenance is 7 136MW of capacity.
The struggling power utility has apologised for the inconvenience caused by load shedding and stated communications will be made promptly should there be any significant changes.