City Power to reduce load shedding hours for Joburg

City Power will exclude key customers, essential services and some businesses from load shedding and is also eliminating the “4-hour-long” power cuts.

The announcement was made by Johannesburg Environment Infrastructure Services MMC Jack Sekwaila on Thursday.

Investments

Sekwaila said the move, which will start gradually from early June 2023, will go a long way in saving the much-needed jobs and ensuring businesses remain invested within the city.

“The city has the responsibility to attract investments, retain those already operating within Joburg, and secure the jobs for our residents.

“Most small businesses were forced to close due to the impact of loadshedding while still recovering from Covid-19. These plans will go a long way in ensuring we keep the economic activity going on in the midst of this gruelling load shedding,” Sekwaila said.

ALSO READ: City Power losing millions due to Eskom’s load shedding

Load shedding schedule

The changes come as City Power works towards implementing a new load shedding schedule which will see the 4-hour schedule currently happening from stage 4, reduced to 2 a hour schedule throughout up until stage 8.

City Power intially made an about-turn on plans to roll out a highly reduced load-shedding schedule to customers and businesses.

City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava said technicians and engineers have been conducting simulations and looking for ways to reduce the “burden of load shedding on customers, infrastructure and resources.”

“With the higher stages of loadshedding which are becoming our lived reality now, the lives of our customers are heavily disrupted. The new schedule will ensure that our customers no longer endure many hours of loadshedding, with others shed for 4hrs in one go.

“This schedule will reduce the frequency of customers being shed and in addition, blocks will not get shed at the same time for the same stage in consecutive days. In simple terms, our customers will be on for longer than it is now, especially in lower stages,” Mashava said.

Eskom consultations

City Power said it is finalising plans and consultations with Eskom to ensure a smooth transition and the full implementation of the new load shedding schedule in the city of five million people by early to mid-June, which will see it assume complete responsibility for operating all of its substations during load shedding.

“We will be able to ensure an equitable distribution of the load shedding amount on customers and also ensure that we provide Eskom only with the exact amount of load required in each load shedding cycle,” Mashava added.

Load shedding duration

According to City Power the design of the new load shedding schedule eliminates the 4-hour duration in all stages and maintains 2 hours (plus 30 minutes) up to stage 8.

“In a 4 or 5-day stage 1 or 2 load shedding, a customer may be shed only once per day.  After a block is restored, there is a 2-hour reprieve before the next-scheduled time. The maximum duration the block can be switched off in 24 hours is 12 hours or 6 times in higher stages like stage 8,” City Power said.

ALSO READ: City Power retracts announcement of just two hours load shedding a day