South Africans are currently suffering through a record-long stretch of load shedding.
The current bout of intensive load shedding, which at times worsened to Stage 6, started in the early morning hours of September 8.
By midnight on Tuesday, South Africa will have suffered through rolling blackouts that lasted 19 days and 19 hours, a total of 475 hours, Eskom confirmed.
The previous longest streak was 403 hours, from end-June to mid-July, according to data from the load shedding alert app Eskom se Push.
During that time, South Africa also saw Stage 6 load shedding for the first time since 2019.
The third longest streak was in mid-March 2021 (185 hours), followed by March 2019 (183 hours) and December 2019 (180 hours)
Earlier this month, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter said the utility had considered continuous load shedding and to "normalise" it at Stage 2, instead of introducing it only when the power system faces a crunch.
This would give Eskom more scope to plan for maintenance.
However, the utility found that nonstop load shedding at low levels wouldn’t add "significant additional" headroom for doing maintenance, and decided not to opt for it.
"We have debated [permanent load shedding] extensively internally. In a certain way, the planned maintenance we carry out contributes to load shedding because it is capacity that we plan to take off the grid," De Ruyter said during a briefing.