As South Africa’s primary electricity supplier, Eskom’s mandate is to ensure security of supply to service the South African economy and society.

Eskom therefore generates, transports and distributes electricity – and this is managed predominantly by Eskom for the entire country; however, Eskom only directly supplies more than 5 million households which means that most of us are supplied by municipalities.

At all times there must be sufficient supply to meet demand, but electricity demand is not consistent because of:

• peak periods when demand is higher
• and continuous growth in the number of customers requiring electricity services.

Load shedding, or load reduction, is done countrywide as a controlled option to respond to unplanned events to protect the electricity power system from a total blackout. While we generally use the word blackout loosely to mean “no lights” in our local area, a country-wide blackout has much more serious consequences, which can occur when there is too much demand and too little supply, bringing the power system into an imbalance – tripping the power system in its entirety.

For more information or to check your latest loadshedding schedules in your community, please visit the Eskom website