City Power scrambles to fix faults in Joburg as load-shedding dips to stage 1

Load-shedding resumes at stage 1 on Monday, kicking in at 9am after the early-morning traffic peak.

Emergency reserves had adequately recovered to allow for a reduction in the depth of load-shedding, the power utility said.

City Power in Johannesburg said it hoped to use the reduction “breather to deal with the backlog in faults emanating from load-shedding and stormy weekend weather.

“By midday on Sunday, City Power had about 2,000 calls from customers reporting faults, with most of them coming from Roodepoort and Hurst Hill [Sophiatown/Westbury area].

“Our teams will remain deployed in hotspot areas, including Roodepoort, Randburg and Hurst Hill, to attend to the outages,” said City Power.

At 4pm on Sunday, unplanned outages had removed 11,126MW off the national electricity grid and the possibility of rolling blackouts remains for the rest of the week.

“We will give a further update to the public on Monday afternoon as to the state of the system going forward,” Eskom said.

“Eskom also wishes to remind South Africans that there is an increased possibility of load-shedding over the next 18 months as we are conducting critical maintenance to restore the ageing plant to good health.”