CAPE TOWN, June 28 (Xinhua) -- South Africa's power utility Eskom on Tuesday announced that it will enhance the level of load shedding from the current Stage 4 to the more severe Stage 6 in certain periods on Tuesday and Wednesday, citing unlawful and unprotected wage-related labor action that caused disruption to the utility's power plants.
This is the worst power outage since 2019. Eskom has only implemented Stage 6 load shedding once, in December 2019. Stage 6 load shedding will be implemented from 4 p.m. until 10 p.m. on Tuesday and 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Wednesday, while Stage 4 or Stage 2 will be implemented during other hours, it said in a statement.
Eskom said the labor action has caused widespread disruption to its power plants, which compels it to continue taking precautionary measures to conserve generation capacity and safeguard plants from damage.
Before the latest announcement, Eskom last Friday said it would raise the load shedding from Stage 2 to Stage 4 most of the time from Friday to Sunday due to "unprotected labor action", following a deadlock in wage negotiations.
On Sunday, it extended Stage 4 until this Wednesday after labor action at power stations impacted planned maintenance and repairs.
Eskom currently has 3,218 megawatts (MW) on planned maintenance, while another 17,621MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns.
Trade unions have been demanding a 10 percent wage increase while Eskom only offered a 5.3 percent increase.
A major South African trade union representing workers at Eskom, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), told Xinhua on Monday that it doesn't know when the negotiations will resume.
Another union, Solidarity, also said it doesn't know the date for the resumption of the talks, and denied involvement in the labor action. ■