After more malfunctions in its generating plants, South Africa’s power company, Eskom, decided to extend its planned nationwide power outage on Monday.
After losing 4,000MW due to the loss of two power units, the state utility stated it was instituting stage four load shedding, or programmed blackouts.
“Unfortunately, Eskom was forced to initiate Stage 4 load shedding at 07:20 due to Majuba Unit 5 and Tutuka Unit 4 tripping,” the company announced on Twitter.
Eskom initiated Stage 2 load shedding on Sunday after losing 2,000MW of power due to other producing units tripping.
South Africa’s energy issue has previously been blamed on poor maintenance, growing expenses, declining revenues, decaying infrastructure, corruption, and mismanagement.
Eskom has since apologized, calling the power outage as “unprecedented.”
