No Load Shedding Since May 2025, Eskom Confirms Stable Winter 2026

On 28 April 2026, Eskom confirmed no load shedding was predicted for winter 2026, with national grid stability holding since roughly mid-May 2025. That run has continued: as of 3 September 2026, South Africa had gone 476 consecutive days without load shedding, and Eskom’s Energy Availability Factor reached 67.79%, its highest level since 2020, with unplanned outages down to 19.47% year-on-year from 26.99%. South Africa completed the full 2026 winter without a single load-shedding day.

For Umdloti specifically, this means the village has not faced the scheduled national outages that shaped daily life across South Africa for much of the preceding decade. A separate, narrower mechanism called “load reduction” covers specific overloaded local feeders and is being phased out nationally on its own timeline. It is not the same thing as load shedding: a local feeder issue can still cause an outage even during a stretch with zero national load shedding.

This status entry is marked resolved because the specific claim, no load shedding since mid-2025 and none forecast for or experienced in winter 2026, held true as of this update on 8 September 2026. If Eskom’s position changes, this page and its date will be updated rather than leaving a stale “all clear” sitting here indefinitely.

See /status for the current live picture, and moving to Umdloti for how this fits the wider relocation picture.