Tshwane metro plans to have its own power generation
A spokesperson says the municipality was looking into getting its own “energy mix”, which will see the metro not being so badly affected by load-shedding.
The Tshwane metro has partnered with the Department of Small Business Development to ease the financial burden on small businesses hit by load-shedding in the city.
The metro said even though it’s in a precarious financial position and might not have a plan to cushion small enterprises against load-shedding itself, it was hoping that the partnership would bring some kind of relief.
“Currently, the Small Enterprise Development Agency (Seda) and the department are working on a plan to shield small enterprises across the country, including Tshwane-based enterprises,” metro spokesperson Lindela Mashigo told Rekord.
“The metro, through its partnership with Seda, will be able to leverage that scheme once it is finalised as it has been the case during the Covid-19 lockdowns.”
This comes as an 18.65% electricity tariff increase is also expected to hit businesses and residents hard.
Mashigo also said that the municipality was looking into other sources of power for an optimal “energy mix”, to limit the effect of Eskom load-shedding.
He, however, did not say what kind of mix this would be only saying it would be determined by what proposal the council adopted.
“We are still in the planning phase with no definite timeline as yet,” he said.
He said that even “lower” stage 2 and 3 load-shedding put on a strain on the metro infrastructure.
“The only time the metro will not be impacted by load-shedding would be when it had its own generation initiatives in place via a partnership with its stakeholders,” said Mashigo.
Eskom has implemented stage 6 load-shedding four times since September last year though this dropped to stage 5 on Wednesday.
Eskom head of generation, Thomas Conradie, said load-shedding would drop to stage 4 on Friday then, hopefully, to stage 3.
“On Saturday, we will assess the situation again to see which units have returned to look at next week’s outlook in terms of load-shedding requirements and capacity availability,” he said.
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