Early Tuesday morning, the Eskom site indicated no load-shedding for the day. But the Ladysmith Gazette issued a warning anyway after it became clear that something was up.

Later in the morning, Eskom issued a stage 1 load-shedding warning as it began increasing the number of outages it wanted implemented to prevent the national grid from being overwhelmed.  The rapid switch from “Stage 1” to “Stage 2” is a clear indication that demand clearly threatened to outstrip capacity.

Eskom said on its website that it was moving its controlled outages from “Stage 1” to “Stage 2.” Eskom has confirmed that the blackouts will continue until 10pm this evening… with only “Stage 3” controlled outages between it and a total grid meltdown. A total grid meltdown or failure would take weeks to recover from, Eskom warned previously.

Group 1 is currently being load-shed, with Group 2 scheduled to go off from 3pm until 6pm. Group 3 will go off from 6pm until 9/10pm.