Pretoria - Johannesburg’s City Power unit says the endless load shedding by Eskom is negatively impacting it by putting a strain on its ageing infrastructure, that is also subject to cable theft and vandalism.
City Power said it had received over 2800 complaints from residents around Johannesburg on Friday morning. The complaints were mainly due to power outages after scheduled load shedding.
“This morning, we opened up with more than 2 800 calls from customers reporting outages,” City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena told IOL.
He said the majority of the outages are reported in the Hursthill area, including suburbs such as Windsor, Cresta, Linden, and Randburg, affecting areas like Northwold, Olievedale, Sonneglans, and Roodepoort .
“We also had outages affecting most of the south areas in The Hill, Mulbarton, and Turfontein areas. Most of these failed to come back after load shedding, due to equipment failure, and blown up mini substations and transformers,” said Mangena.
“But we also have opportunist characters who take advantage of the downtime during load shedding, when lights are off, to vandalise and steal our equipment, including cables.
“We only get to pick those problems when we switch on the power and the affected areas are not restored,” said Mangena.
He said City Power often depends on customers to call before it responds because of insufficient network coverage from its SCADA system.
“City Power can only remotely operate a certain number of our substations,” said Mangena.
“Customers need to always assist by switching off power guzzling equipment like geysers, water pumps, heaters and stoves, because this causes the system to trip due to overloading.
“When load shedding ends and power is restored, we experience a surge of current that creates an outage due to load on the system, which prolongs the outage,” added Mangena.
Mangena explained that the two-hour load shedding intervals are also posing a “serious challenge and threat” to infrastructure.
“City Power operators are operating the network manually where there is no network coverage, therefore the two-hour operating load shedding schedule is damaging the infrastructure due to manual operating. It also over stretches our already strained resources, including warm bodies,” he said.
City Power said it has been implementing contingency measures to reduce the impact of the load shedding customers.
“During load-shedding, we are increasing the number of security patrols to deal with vandalism and theft in known hotspots. We are also in the process of reviewing the two-hour load-shedding schedule, to address the frequent manual operating that is damaging our network infrastructure, but also address the frequency at which customers have to be load shed,” he said.
“When we had four hours for example, customers were load shed once a day, but now they have to be load shed twice or thrice a day, especially during higher stages of load shedding,” added Mangena.
Eskom announced that it would be moving load shedding to Stage 3 from Thursday at 9pm.
Thereafter, Stage 2 would be implemented from Friday at 5am, until at least Monday.
This comes after the country has been experiencing rolling Stage 4 load shedding blackouts since Wednesday.
IOL