Tshwane teams deployed to address prolonged outages
“Across South Africa the municipal electrical distribution systems are not designed for loadshedding conditions.”
The Tshwane metro has planned to deploy teams across the city to respond to prolonged outages caused by Eskom’s load-shedding.
This follows Eskom implementing stage 2 load-shedding throughout the weekend, since Thursday last week, saying it was necessary to address other additional risks in its generation fleet.
Tshwane’s energy and electricity MMC Phillip Nel said with Eskom once again implementing load-shedding, the city’s suffered significant disruption with its electrical infrastructure.
“Load-shedding leads to the tripping of electricity grids and power surges due to overloading when load-shedding ends,” said Nel.
He said during load-shedding the turning on and off of electricity to a grid happened up to three times per day.
“Across South Africa the municipal electrical distribution systems are not designed for load-shedding conditions.
“This is a major challenge as the electrical load is synchronised.”
He said due to a large number of geysers, pumps, heaters, air conditioners, starting simultaneously, this led to a start-up current of rotating machines working three times higher during the first few seconds.
“It is this concentrated load that sometimes is high enough to trip a circuit breaker. It is even possible that the peak current is high enough to cause a blow out on the joints of the 11kV cables buried underground.”
Nel said the city had now started deploying both the energy and electricity department and the regional operations and co-ordination teams across the municipality to assist with the prolonged outages caused by load-shedding.
“Our teams will work to restore electricity as quickly as they can.”
He said residents also needed to be team players and protect themselves against such trips and failures by doing the following:
– Switch off all rotating machines, heaters and geysers before the planned reconnection time.
– When power is restored, wait a few minutes before boiling the kettle and resuming cooking.
– Switch geysers, pumps, etc. on only after power has definitely stabilised. This can be achieved by switching off all circuit breakers excluding lights, during the power outage period.
“The lights will confirm when power is restored and other circuits can then be switched on gradually after power is stable. It will also protect electronic equipment.”
Nel said Tshwane residents needed to work together to protect electricity infrastructure by limiting the initial load on the system.
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