Endumeni residents were left frustrated on Saturday afternoon when they could not watch either the Springboks in action against Italy or Kaizer Chiefs up against Sundowns because of a two-hour load shedding programme scheduled by Eskom.

The power went off between 4pm and 6pm in Dundee and again on Sunday. Strangely, Glencoe was not affected by the Saturday outage.

Phase two of load shedding means the power will go off for two-hours a day – either from 4pm to 6pm or from 6am to 8.30am.

However, this morning Eskom said in a Tweet ‘probability for load shedding is low during the day on Monday with a possible increased risk during the evening peak, 5pm to 10pm.’

Readers reacted on Facebook to the outage:
Cheryl Elliott:

Thank you very flippin much. No rugby, power went off. Makes me livid

Gillian Meek Holm:

Pathetic. Wonder if we actually going to see some rugby! Dash, dot, dash…

Nakkita Bugden :

oh yes we know all about it,frustrating

Rob Marshall:

Plenty power at Marloth but I’ve chosen to sit at home an watch the animals come to drink and the birds bathing in the bird bath – much more exciting!

Allan McLeod:

Us to Cheryl I bet the fat cats are not subject to this sh*t

Cheryl Elliott”

If it was a pathetic soccer match that even any school team could thrash i bet the power would be on. Gees man. Unbelievable.

Karen Mordecai-Jones:]

Loadshedding?

 Eskom’s blame game

Eskom has blamed the country’s electricity woes on a collapsed coal storage silo, ‎a short supply of diesel, water and the weather.

“The reasons that Eskom has given for the prevailing blackouts that we have been experiencing are consequential reasons based on an underlying cause,‎ namely that the completion of Medupi and Kusile is running 10 years late.”

Energy analyst, Chris Yelland, told www.fin24.comthe first five-year delay was caused by policy indecisions and the second five years by execution delays.

“The government has only itself to blame for policy indecision and Eskom is largely responsible for the execution delays.”

Yelland cited the following six reasons for the delays at Medupi and Kusile that have caused the prevailing electricity crisis:

1)    The first reason is a lack of clear policy decision. Yelland said this delayed the decision to proceed with Medupi and Kusile by 5 years.‎

2)    The absence of a funding plan. Yelland said that the construction of Medupi and Kusile had proceeded without knowing where the money would come from to pay for the projects. “A few years into the projects, they had to be delayed until government had put a funding plan in place.”

3)    Geological problems during the civil work phase. Yelland said that inadequate geological surveys were done. “This resulted in major delays in the construction of the foundations of Medupi and Kusile.”

4)    Boiler-welding issues. The contract with Hitachi saw major welding quality problems within the boilers, which required significant rework.

5)    Inadequate level of skills and inadequate availability of skills. Yelland said this was partly due to the fact that two mega projects were built at the same time.

6)    Labour problems resulted in significant strikes and labour unrest during the construction period which brought work at Medupi and Kusile‎ to a standstill. “Initially Eskom did not implement a site-wide labour agreement,” said Yelland. “Conditions of employment of site labour were left to the many contractors, and this meant, for example, that workers doing similar work were being paid differently, leading to discontent.”