South Africans will be saddled with intensified load shedding for the rest of the week as more generation units have failed.

Eskom has announced that of 9am this morning it will be enforcing Stage 4 power cuts until 5am on Friday. Thereafter load shedding will be downgraded to Stage 2 until 5am on Monday.

According to Eskom the Stage 4 outages will give it the space to replenish emergency reserves and continue to manage the system safely.

Total breakdowns are at over 15 000 MW while planned maintenance is at 5500 MW.