‘This is beyond our control and we apologise’ – City Power

City Power confirmed that Stage 6 means more hours without power and more problems for their network.

Both residents from South Hills and Thulisa Park are livid because of these persisting power outages. They said it is ridiculous.

The mayhem started on April 14 when a scheduled load-shedding was administered, however, when it was time for electricity to come back on, it didn’t. In other areas, it only came back for five minutes.

One resident who spoke to Southern Courier said, “They are messing with us. First, it was water, now it is electricity. Are we going to be without power for 13 days again, like we did with water? We have newborn babies and our area has a lot of old age homes. Why are we living like this?”

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena explained the cause of these outages

He said its customers have been experiencing many outages after load-shedding restorations and prolonged outages due to the higher stages of blackouts.

“Load-shedding Stage 6 is causing more shocks and challenges for City Power, its systems and infrastructure, and by extension, the customers. The main reason that is causing these trips is overloaded circuits.

“Simplified, tripping means the interruption in electricity supply, which occurs when protective relays sense a fault, either from overload, equipment failure, cable fault or other factors. The circuit breaker trips to isolate the faulty lines from the rest of the healthy sections. This happens to avoid serious damage to the power infrastructure.

“To put the substation back online from an overload-triggered trip, the team must first balance the load. That’s why even after power has been duly restored, some areas will remain off until the in-rush current subsides.

“In some instances, overloading results in costly damages to the infrastructure – where we have transformers, mini substations and cables burnt or failed due to post-load-shedding overload. That’s why it takes longer to restore power in some cases. Materials required for repairs are increasingly becoming difficult to source, as is gets depleted faster than we procure. For example, we have so far this year used 27 000 cable joints – an amount we used in three years in the previous years.”

Huge losses

“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 fewer but currently, we have more than 500 plants that are out of service which is attributable to the relentless load-shedding episodes. This is compounded by the fact that during load-shedding we are not able to do maintenance and as such are not able to keep up with the breakdowns which cause outages.

“Since last month we have been hovering around Stages 4 to 6, with 6 being the highest stage sustained most of this week and it looks like it will go into the weekend. The Eskom-aligned schedule we use during the higher stages of load-shedding, especially stage 6 where we are now, forces some customers in certain blocks to be shed for four hours, instead of two. 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 load-shedding, especially stage 6, which, unfortunately, we have to live with until Eskom’s capacity challenges are over,” explained Mangena.

An undesired nuisance

CEO Tshifularo Mashava said, “The past few days have been the hardest for our customers and our 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.

“While we try our best to increase capacity in different areas of our operations to offset what would have been a disastrous impact on our customers, we want to plead with the residents to play their part.

“This includes doing simple things like reducing their consumption and unplugging heavy appliances before load-shedding restorations to avoid trips. This includes those with energy storage facilities like batteries and UPS systems to enable the load to settle first before plugging them back on after load-shedding.”

Mangena said they will continue to assist their customers to plan their lives better through the load-shedding schedules they share on different platforms including councillors’ WhatsApp groups, social media and the website.

“Half of the challenges we face can be reduced by the attitude change from our customers in terms of their consumption, especially as we enter the winter season. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this to our customers,” he said.