Eskom has been working very hard to avoid load shedding on Election Day, after enduring 32 days of load shedding since 1 April as a country, South Africans can rest assured that there will be no power cuts on Election Day.

Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer pronounced that the power utility has been working with the Independent Electoral Commission to ensure power cuts do not impact the local government elections, He spoke during a media briefing on Monday, where the company’s executives provided details of its operational performance.

Oberholzer stated that Eskom will reduce the risk of load shedding to a minimum. “We are confident at this point that the way we manage the system, we make use of some of the emergencies during the day, but we recover them at night. It will assist us to reduce the risks of loadshedding to a minimum”.

“We also had a good look at some of the opportunistic maintenance to see how we can plan that. On the distribution side of all the stations, our distribution colleagues are working closely with IEC to make sure that electricity will be available. I have spoken to the generation transmission and distribution colleagues to be on standby from the end of this week until after the elections have taken place,” said Oberholzer.

Oberholzer also vowed that the coming rainy weather won’t impact the supply of coal. “Our coal stock levels are healthy we have done a lot of preparation to avoid wet coal this coming summer and making good progress in reducing the rand/ton costs of coal. Eskom is making a concerted effort to continue improving its coal handling ability to reduce the risk of wet coal incidents during the coming rainy season.”

Oberholzer added that Eskom will deploy teams on standby should any power cuts occur during elections day. Oberholzer and his executive team briefed the media on Monday on the state of the power system.