South African power utility Eskom on Wednesday ratcheted up scheduled power cuts to “Stage 6”, the worst outage level on record, as its ageing fleet of coal-fired power stations continues to suffer breakdowns.
“The curtailment that we’ve seen over the last number of weeks is more than we have flexibility in the system for and we have seen more impact on the operations,” Viljoen said in a call after the company’s annual production update. The company said refined PGM output for 2023 and 2024 was now expected to be between 3.6 million and 4 million ounces, lower than the initial guided range of 3.8 million to 4.2 million ounces for 2023 and 4.1 million to 4.5 million in 2024.