Freezing cold snap has pushed electricity demand beyond the grid's limits.
Johannesburg woke up to a crisis on Wednesday as City Power’s backlog of outage calls doubled overnight. Picture: Supplied.
Johannesburg woke up to a crisis on Wednesday as City Power’s backlog of outage calls doubled overnight, surging from 3 000 to more than 6 000.
Persistent rain, light snowfall, howling winds, and bitterly cold weather gripped parts of Gauteng, the provincial weather bureau warning that the adverse weather conditions are expected to continue for the rest of the week.
Electricity demand
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena warned that the freezing cold snap has pushed electricity demand beyond the grid’s limits.
When we went to sleep last night, we were sitting at just over 3 000 outage calls, but we were waking up this morning with that number having doubled; we were sitting at just over 6 000 outage calls this morning.
“I think it’s because of the demand, the increase in the demand of electricity with this cold snap, basically, the temperatures going down and people looking for ways to basically warm themselves up and ensure that they also do other household chores,” Mangena told eNCA.
Spike
Mangena explained that demand is spiking higher than anticipated, putting immense pressure on City Power’s systems.
“We have also seen with the outages that we’ve had to deal with, especially in the Hurst Hill area, going to the outage that happened at Delta substation last night, and not only last night, but on Monday night, which basically just shot those numbers up with customers demanding answers.
“But we had our teams overnight, basically, attend to most of this, because we were expecting that when we woke up this morning, the numbers should have actually subsided a little, but they haven’t,” Mangena said.
Ageing infrastructure
He explained that the cold snap has overwhelmed ageing infrastructure.
“We are still running old infrastructure within the City of Johannesburg, and the recovery of loads is not as fast as it is supposed to be. This is partly due to a lack of investment in improvement and maintenance,” he admitted.
Mangena said City Power has now summoned all available technicians and contractors in a bid to stabilise supply.
“We’ve got all hands on deck – internal teams, operating staff, and contractors – to respond, especially in those hotspots,” Mangena stressed.
Climate change
Pressed on contingency planning, Mangena acknowledged the broader challenge of climate‑linked extremes.
“Each time you have a stormy season, we have problems. Now we’ve been hit by this big cold snap. The pressure on the grid is big time. We can’t keep having this on and off all the time,” he said.
Despite the strain, Mangena insisted City Power is doubling its efforts.
