The lights are out but it's not load shedding: City of Tshwane warns of prolonged power outages

The City of Tshwane says higher stages of load-shedding are presenting a crisis for the metro municipality, leading to prolonged unplanned power outages.

Eskom implemented stage 6 load-shedding recently, meaning there are rolling power cuts two to three times a day for a total time without electricity at a minimum of six hours a day.

Utilities, regional operations and co-ordination MMC Themba Fosi said higher stages of load-shedding are affecting the condition of the municipality's electricity network and its ability to attend to outages.

“Our networks were never designed for load-shedding and continuously turning the electricity network off and on has a major impact on the condition of our network infrastructure,” said Fosi.

He said residents were aware load-shedding can result in additional outages due to overloading the network, vandalism and theft of the city’s infrastructure.

“As the frequency of load-shedding increases, city resources will be stretched with just switching areas off and on. The same teams needed to perform this switching also play a critical role in electricity network repair and maintenance work and will have significantly less time available to work on restoring electricity on outages that are not related to load-shedding.”

Fosi said the heavy rain recently made matters worse, with wet weather increasing the likelihood of equipment faults.

“This situation is serious for the entire Tshwane.

“We continue to pursue long-term interventions to see what the city can do to alleviate this challenge. This includes launching our energy task team, who are looking at alternative electricity solutions, including renewable energy and power from independent power producers. In the interim, we all need to work together to best manage this difficult time,” Fosi said.

TimesLIVE