What Eskom’s Load Reduction Schedule Actually Means — and Why It’s Different From Load Shedding

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South Africa has now gone 300 consecutive days without load shedding. The headlines are celebrating, the memes are relieved, and Eskom’s PR team is having its best quarter in years. But in Soweto, parts of Tembisa, sections of Polokwane and dozens of townships across Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, the lights are still going off every morning at five and every evening at five. Not because the national grid is failing — it isn’t — but because of something called load reduction, which is a completely separate problem that millions of South Africans have quietly been living with while everyone else celebrates. This article explains exactly what load reduction is, why it’s not the same as load shedding, who it affects, and what Eskom is doing about it.

The Headline Number Nobody Talks About

On 13 March 2026, South Africa reached 300 consecutive days without load shedding — a milestone the government described as reflecting “the sustained upward trajectory in plant performance.” The Energy Availability Factor — the standard measure of how much of Eskom’s generation fleet is operational and available — currently sits at 65.85% for the financial year to date, with the fleet hitting or exceeding the 70% benchmark on 83 separate occasions. For context, the EAF was barely above 55% during the worst of the 2023 crisis. These are real, measurable improvements.

The financial evidence is just as striking. Diesel expenditure for the financial year to date is R8.58 billion lower than the same period last year — a 57.35% reduction year on year. In 2024, Eskom was burning through R33 billion a year in diesel to keep its open-cycle gas turbines running as emergency backup. That figure has halved. These are not cosmetic stats. The turnaround is substantive.

But buried in the same press statement that announced those 300 days, a quieter figure: approximately 1.69 million of Eskom’s 7.2 million customers across 971 feeders — mainly in Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal — are still affected by load reduction. That is roughly one in four Eskom direct customers. They experience scheduled outages twice daily, every day. They are not experiencing the 300-day milestone. They are experiencing a different system, driven by different causes, with a different timeline for resolution.

What Load Reduction Actually Is — and Why It Happens

To understand load reduction, you need a basic picture of how electricity reaches your home. Power is generated at a power station and travels through the national transmission grid at very high voltage. It then passes through a series of substations that step the voltage down progressively until it reaches a local transformer — usually the green or grey metal box you can see on a street corner or mounted on a pole in a suburb. That local transformer serves a specific cluster of homes and businesses. It is designed to handle a known maximum load, calculated on the basis of how many legal connections it supplies.

Load reduction is a deliberate, localised measure taken by Eskom to prevent damage to specific parts of the electricity distribution network — like transformers and mini-substations — when local electricity demand exceeds what that infrastructure can safely handle. When too many households draw power simultaneously — particularly in the morning when people are showering, cooking and heating water, and in the evening when they return home — a transformer can overheat. Exceeding design loads through electricity theft can overload equipment, potentially causing explosions that may lead to electrical fires in surrounding areas.

This is not theoretical. According to Eskom, about 94% of total overloaded transformers face damage or destruction due to electricity theft and indiscriminate electricity use. Transformers exploding due to illegal connections, equipment theft and vandalism have caused lengthy power outages, severe injuries and loss of life. There are documented cases of transformer explosions causing fires in informal settlements. The safety angle is real, not just a cover story.

There are currently around 2,111 transformers which are frequently overloaded across the country and at risk of being damaged, with around 900 transformers awaiting replacement. Eskom has spent over R300 million replacing failed transformers and mini-substations in the past year, recouping nothing in revenue for those replacements because the infrastructure was destroyed by theft and illegal connections in the first place.

Critically, a transformer damaged by overloading can leave an area without power for up to six months while replacement parts are sourced and installed. That is the trade-off Eskom is making: cut power for two hours twice a day now, or risk losing it entirely for six months if the transformer blows. Load reduction, viewed through that lens, is the less bad option.

Load Shedding vs Load Reduction: A Side-by-Side Breakdown

The confusion between the two is understandable — both result in your lights going off, and neither is your fault as a paying customer. But the causes, geography, scheduling logic and solutions are entirely different.

When Does Load Reduction Happen — and How Do You Find Your Schedule?

Unlike load shedding, which runs on a single national schedule published by Eskom and accessible through the EskomSePush app, load reduction is managed at the distribution level and varies by feeder and area. There is no single app that reliably covers all load reduction zones, which is one of the reasons many affected residents don’t fully understand the pattern of their outages.

Eskom implements load reduction from 05:00–09:00 and 17:00–22:00 — the two peak demand windows when transformer overloading risk is highest. These are not random cuts. They are precisely timed to the periods when residents are most likely to use high-draw appliances simultaneously: early morning kettles, geysers and heaters, and the evening cooking-and-lighting peak.

To find your area’s schedule, Eskom’s official distribution page at eskom.co.za/distribution/load-reduction lists affected areas by province, with block schedules that indicate whether your zone is on Block A, B, or C. Third-party platforms including OurPower.co.za also aggregate provincial schedules. If you live in an affected area and Eskom has your contact details, Eskom has pledged to communicate with affected customers through normal channels including SMS and Customer Connect newsletters.

The Real Problem: Electricity Theft and What It Does to Infrastructure

Eskom is unambiguous about what is driving load reduction: electricity theft. Electricity theft activities include illegal connections, network equipment theft, vandalism, meter bypasses and tampering, unauthorised network operations, and purchasing electricity from illegal vendors. Together, these practices mean that the actual load on a local transformer can be multiples of what it was engineered to carry.

The scale is significant. The primary causes of load reduction remain illegal connections and meter bypassing — practices that constitute electricity theft and place severe strain on the network, leading to transformer overloads, equipment damage, and in extreme cases, explosions and prolonged outages. A transformer designed for, say, 500 legal connections in a township may in reality be serving 800 or 1,000 households because of unregistered connections drawn directly from the distribution line. Every watt drawn illegally is a watt that was never accounted for in the transformer’s load design.

This creates a deeply inequitable outcome: paying, legal customers in the same feeder zone lose power alongside everyone else during load reduction — because there is no physical way to exclude specific houses from the blackout when the whole feeder is cut. While Eskom aims to exclude paying customers from load reduction, the network’s configuration does not allow for dedicated supply lines to paying customers, making it impractical to service them separately. That is frustrating and legitimate to be angry about. It is also, on current infrastructure, simply true.

There is also a winter amplification effect. During the winter season, there is an exponential increase in energy demand in areas prone to electricity theft, as electricity is often used indiscriminately — primarily for heating. In informal settlements and high-density townships where gas or paraffin alternatives are expensive or unavailable, every household runs electric heaters, heated blankets and bar heaters simultaneously from around 5pm. The transformer load spikes sharply. Load reduction follows.

Eskom’s Plan to End Load Reduction — and How Realistic It Is

Eskom has a stated plan to eliminate load reduction, and it has set specific milestones. The utility has committed to reducing load reduction by 15–20% by March 2026 and eradicating it within 18 months by removing and formalising 640,000 illegal connections by March 2026, upgrading infrastructure including smart metres, reducing zero buyers and illegal vending, and increasing free basic electricity registration in key areas.

Progress on some of these targets has been real. As of March 2026, 199,160 customers are no longer affected during peak periods. Eskom has installed and uploaded 72,499 smart meters on load reduction feeders, with more than 90% of these installations in Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and KwaZulu-Natal. These smart meters allow Eskom to detect tampering and manage demand more precisely — but the programme aims to install 577,347 meters in total, meaning current progress is at around 12.6% of the overall target.

The harder obstacle is community resistance. Installation teams continue to face persistent resistance, including intimidation, violent incidents and repeated work stoppages. These disruptions have led to deployment delays, the redeployment of teams, and heightened safety risks for Eskom employees and contractors. Smart meter installation in areas where illegal connections are common threatens the source of free electricity for households that have come to depend on it — and that creates a political and social dynamic that cannot be resolved by engineering alone.

Eskom has set a target of cutting load reduction instances by 15–20% by March 2026 and eliminating it completely by 2027, with priority provinces being Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal. The 2027 elimination target is ambitious. South Africa’s history with infrastructure deadlines, combined with the social complexity of formalising electricity access in areas with high poverty rates, suggests that 2027 is a goal rather than a guarantee.

What You Can Actually Do If You’re Affected

If you live in a load reduction zone, your options are limited but not zero. Here is a practical, realistic breakdown of what helps.

Is Load Reduction Fair? The Question Worth Asking

There is a legitimate fairness argument that rarely gets made plainly: load reduction disproportionately affects poorer communities. The areas where electricity theft is most prevalent are, almost universally, areas with high unemployment, inadequate housing, and historically underinvested infrastructure. The people sitting in the dark twice daily during load reduction are largely not the people responsible for the illegal connections causing it — yet they bear the consequences of it equally.

Eskom’s own distribution executive acknowledged the tension in a 2024 statement: Eskom aims to exclude paying customers from load reduction, but the network configuration often complicates service provision. The utility is not wrong on the technical point. But the outcome — that low-income areas experience daily scheduled blackouts while wealthier suburbs affected only by national load shedding experience zero outages — is a real and politically charged disparity.

The free basic electricity expansion Eskom is pursuing — registering eligible households to receive their baseline allocation at no charge — is partly an attempt to reduce the incentive for illegal connections. If people have a legal, cost-free baseline allocation, the rationale for bypassing a meter diminishes. But this requires correct registration, working meters, and functioning billing systems across millions of informal households. It is the right policy direction. The execution is the hard part.

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