Eskom lightens up for next week

Johannesburg - South Africans will be free of scheduled power cuts next week, said Eskom on Thursday.

It will be a short working week because of public holidays, and the parastatal said the scheduled power cuts would not go ahead as demand was historically lower on public holidays.

It said in a statement that although demand for power in the evenings was expected to be "tight", it did not expect to go ahead with load shedding unless "additional problems" were experienced.

Eskom said it was working with municipalities on initiatives to reduce the demand for electricity by the required 10% and municipalities that achieved reduction would be exempted from load shedding as long as the reduction was maintained.