Cape Town – Deferred generator maintenance has caused an overload of unplanned repairs, resulting in a week of darkness for South Africa.

On Tuesday, unplanned outages resulted in 9 500MW being cut off the grid, while planned outages accounted for 5 000MW, according to Eskom spokesperson Khulu Phasiwe.

After implementing a third day of stage 2 (2 000MW cut) load shedding at 06:00 on Tuesday, Eskom escalated the outages to stage 3 (4 000MW cut) at 18:00.

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