City Power blames Eskom and load shedding for high outages

Johannesburg power utility City Power has blamed Eskom and high stages of load shedding for large number of outages across the city.

Eskom has instilled deliberate power cuts interchangeably at various stages leaving South Africans frustrated and municipalities reeling to attend to many areas with outages.

Load shedding

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said its customers have been experiencing many outages after load shedding restorations and prolonged outages due to the higher stages of the deliberate blackouts by Eskom

“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 due to 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,” Mangena said.

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Menace

Mangena said the deliberate power cuts are a menace to City Power’s infrastructure.

“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,” Mangena said.

Millions lost

Mangena warned that City Power is losing million as a result of the rolling blackouts.

“We lose about R3.6m dally due to load shedding and the current higher stages of load shedding do not help.”

“The Eskom-aligned schedule we use during the higher stages of load shedding, especially stage 6 where we are now force 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,” Mangena said.

State of disaser and electricity minister

Earlier this month, Government officially withdrew the national state of disaster on electricity.

In his State of the Nation Address (Sona) in February, President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a national state of disaster to respond to the electricity crisis.

Ramaphosa also appointed Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa as Minister of Electricity in the Presidency which focuses full-time on working with Eskom to end load shedding.