City Power has warned that stage 6 load shedding is causing more shocks and challenges for the utility, its systems, infrastructure, and customers and it is losing millions of rands due to Eskom’s deliberate power cuts.
The regional utility said customers have been experiencing many outages across the city of Johannesburg after load shedding restorations and prolonged outages due to the higher stages of blackouts.
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Load shedding
On Friday, Eskom announced stage 5 power cuts from 5am on Saturday until 4pm, due to ‘lower demand’.
However, the ailing state-owned entity said it would then implement stage 6 deliberate power cuts from 4pm Saturday until 5am Sunday.
Losing millions
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the city of Johannesburg is losing millions due to load shedding.
“We lose about R3.6m daily due to load shedding, and the current higher stages of load shedding do not help.
Most of our Medium Voltage infrastructure is operating on an abnormal configuration due to the high number of abnormal plants. The normal situation is to have about 50 or less but currently, we have more than 500 plants that are out of service which is attributable to the relentless load shedding episodes,” Mangena said.
Impact
Mangena added that the Eskom-aligned schedule City Power use during the higher stages of deliberate power cuts especially Stage 6 forces some customers in certain blocks to be shed for 4 hours, instead of 2.
“This also means that most customers are load shed more than three or four times daily due to the number of blocks we are adding per outage schedule. This is beyond our control and we apologise.
“These are some of the undesirable effects of Loadshedding, especially Stage 6, which unfortunately, we have to live with until Eskom’s capacity challenges are over,” he said.
Nuisance
City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava said the past few days have been the hardest for its customers in Johannesburg and employees whose “sole duty is to keep the lights on and half the time are not able to.”
“The truth is that load shedding is an undesired nuisance for our operations, and the higher stages including Stage 6 where we find ourselves currently, are worse,” she said.
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