Unscheduled power outages cause concern
President Park – A President Park resident has expressed her concerns after their power was cut off outside of the scheduled load shedding times.
A President Park resident has expressed her concerns after their power was cut off outside of the scheduled load shedding times.
Maiya Govender told Midrand Reporter that her area had load shedding from 6pm to 8.30pm on
7 June, however, their power went off until 10pm.
She added on 8 June the same thing happened again and their power went off three times and eventually came back on.
“On 9 June, our power went off at 4pm and was supposed to come back on at 6pm but it came on and went off twice and at 7.30pm we [were] still without power on a freezing cold night,”
she added.
Upon investigating the matter, Ronel Kotze of the communication and stakeholder relations department at Eskom told Midrand Reporter that if an outage occurred outside the load shedding schedule or period it should be treated as a fault and should be reported to Eskom.
She added that when attending to a supply interruption, technicians investigated the cause and repaired it accordingly. “Possible causes of frequent supply interruptions are network overload due to illegal connections, meter tampering and bypasses, unauthorised operations on Eskom electricity equipment, cable theft and vandalism of the infrastructure.
“All these lead to trips as well as equipment failure and explosions.”
Kotze said Eskom was implementing a load reduction initiative to safeguard its assets from repeated failure as a result of overloading caused by illegal connections, meter bypasses, and tampering with electricity infrastructure.
“The power utility is experiencing a substantially high trend of energy demand during peak periods in the mornings and evenings. In the past three years in Gauteng, Eskom recorded the failure of a high number of pole-mounted transformers and mini-substations because of network overloading during the winter period. The load reduction measure is aimed at curbing these failures.”
She concluded by urging the public to use only essential power and refrain from illegal electricity activities to avoid network overloading.
and subsequent infrastructure failures.
She added that to limit the rising costs as a result of equipment failure, the initiative was being implemented on a rotational basis in identified areas or networks that were overloaded, and Glen Austin was one such area.
Details: If customers experience a power failure not coinciding with load shedding it must be reported as a fault to Eskom as follows: SMS your query and account number/meter number to 35328 or email your query to customerservices@eskom.co.za or download the self-help MyEskom Customer app, bill-related enquiries can be checked online at csonline.eskom.co.za. To contact Eskom call contact centre on 08600 37566 [24 hours].
