Eskom, the electricity company, has announced that after a brief period of stage 3 load shedding, it would resume to stage 5 load shedding on Wednesday.
According to the company, stage 3 load shedding will continue until 16h00 on Tuesday, but will be upgraded to stage 4 in the evening.
Load shedding will be enforced at stage 4 until 16h00 on Wednesday before transitioning to stage 5 overnight.
The schedule of stage 4 during the day and stage 5 in the evening will be maintained till further notice, according to the statement.
Eskom will issue another update if any substantial developments occur.
Although social organizations and political parties have petitioned the courts to end the outages, Eskom and former CEO Andre de Ruyter have warned that meddling with load shedding schedules will almost certainly result in a grid meltdown and total blackout.
Load shedding is used as a last option to keep the system from collapsing; requiring Eskom to keep the lights on would not solve the fundamental problem of a shortage of producing capacity.