The City of Joburg says it will launch a framework for procuring energy from Independent Power Producers “in the coming weeks”, as load shedding once again rears its ugly head in South Africa.
The city’s Environment and Infrastructure Services Department (EISD) said that load shedding is causing major damage to its power infrastructure, which was not designed to be constantly powered up and powered down.
This has left some residents frustrated as power does not always return when scheduled.
Further, the city warned that load shedding also provides criminals with a timeframe to steal cables and other infrastructure – which adds additional burden to the administration, and keeps neighbourhoods in the dark for longer.
“Load shedding is not only about being in the dark due to blackouts. It is the exact time cable thieves strike and our infrastructure becomes vulnerable to outages,” said the MMC for EISD, Michael Sun said.
“Not only does load shedding provide a handy schedule to the thugs that steal our cables and other equipment without the risk of electrocution, but City Power infrastructure wasn’t designed to be constantly powered up and powered down. The whole process makes the system more susceptible to faults.”
The EISD appealed to residents for patience as City Power technicians restore power to affected areas. “Proactive measures include using electricity as sparingly as possible directly before and after blackouts to prevent overloads on the network.”
“The city will in coming weeks be launching the framework for the procurement of energy from Independent Power Producers, which will be key in ending Johannesburg’s dependence on Eskom and lessening the impact of load shedding,” it said.
The City of Cape Town has already proven that load shedding can be successfully mitigated by sourcing power outside of Eskom.
Cape Town mayor, Geordin Gwyn Hill-Lewis, said this week that Eskom’s announcement of further load-shedding until Saturday should deeply concern every South African.
“The announcement was made only a few hours after news broke that the national economy contracted back to pre-pandemic size in the second quarter of this year,” he said.
“This is, sadly, unsurprising. This year has seen the worst year of blackouts on record, at some of the highest “stages” ever. Each stage of load shedding costs the national economy R500 million per stage per day; the two weeks of stage 6 load-shedding in late June/early July destroyed R4.2 billion worth of wealth per day,” said the mayor.
According to Hill-Lewis, load shedding is the single biggest driver of unemployment and therefore the single biggest driver of poverty. “The more the national economy continues to bleed jobs and wealth, the further this acute socio-economic crisis will become a chronic and unfixable disaster.”
The mayor said there would be no load-shedding in Cape Town while the rest of the country is on stage 2.
Read: Comical timing of load shedding in South Africa – signs of an ‘unfixable disaster’
