The City of Johannesburg has introduced a ‘load limiting’ system‚ which will reduce the amount of power supplied to the household‚ thus reducing demand and probably averting load-shedding.

The load limiting‚ which is only applicable on smart meters‚ allows the city to send an sms to the ratepayer‚ alerting him or her to reduce demand before power is reduced.

If the ratepayer starts reducing demand before the actual load limiting time‚ they will not experience any power interruption.

When the load limiting is implemented‚ power supplied to the house will be reduced.

If the household has not reduced the load‚ they electricity will go off for 30 seconds and come back. This will give the household to switch off some appliances. If the person in the house does not switch off anything‚ there will be another power outage for 30 seconds and come back.

If there is still no load reduction‚ then there will be an outage.

But if the person at the house reduces load as per sms warning‚ there will still be electricity at the house — albeit on a reduced supply.

Currently there are 65‚037 smart meters in the city. If all these households can reduce their demand from the average of 10A to the load limiting level of 3A‚ the city will get 153 MGW. Eskom’s stage one load-shedding schedule requires 200MGW from City Power. This means with other measures such as ripple control relay which controls geysers remotely using smart meters‚ the load-shedding will be averted.

Just after five minutes of getting a notice from Eskom‚ City Power will be able to send the alerting sms that the load limiting is about to be implemented.

“The success of this programme will definitely depend on the cooperation we get from the residents‚” said executive mayor Parks Tau.

For now this initiative will be implemented with residential customers but there are negotiations with the business community for the roll out on commercial customers.