LISTEN | Eskom sees risk of stage 6 power cuts by Tuesday evening

Eskom sees a “very real risk” of having to implement stage 6 power cuts by 5pm on Tuesday, after 10 generation units went offline overnight.

Eskom ramped up power cuts to stage 4, requiring up to 4,000 megawatts to be shed from the national grid late last week, after labour protests linked to deadlocked wage talks. Under stage 6, 6,000MW needs to be shed from the grid.

The utility plans to meet union leaders again on Tuesday to try to resolve issues relating to the strike, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter said.

Eskom has only implemented stage 6 power cuts once before, in December 2019, COO Jan Oberholzer said.

Some Eskom employees went on an unprotected strike last Tuesday after a deadlock in wage negotiations. On Friday Eskom was granted a court order stopping the unprotected strike at nine power stations and facilities. Incidents of intimidation of employees and blocking roads to power stations and facilities were reported.

As a result, load-shedding was on Friday ramped up to stage 4 and Eskom said it would continue until Wednesday. However, the power utility previously warned that the load-shedding stage could increase or decrease at short notice.

Johannesburg's City Power warned on Monday that the recent ramped-up bout of load-shedding came at a time when it was already overstretched by an increase in capacity demand due to cold weather, while battling rampant cable theft and illegal connections.

“Load-shedding has undesirable effects on the infrastructure which, by its nature was never meant to be switched on and off at short intervals, and comes with it added financial pressures that we did not budget for.”

“Apart from the lost revenue during load-shedding, we are also forced to pull technicians and operators from leave, and many are already fatigued. We are also forced to divide our resources between attending to outage calls and responding to 2-hourly load-shedding switch-ons and offs. In rush currents, multiple cable faults, vandalism, overloading due to the cold weather are the reasons for the trippings in most areas, especially after load-shedding restorations.”

City Power said over the weekend, outage calls hovered above 3,000. By 5pm on Monday afternoon, it was dealing with just over 4,770 outage calls, with more than 2,000 of them over 24 hours. Most of the calls were from the Hursthill area at more than 1,700, followed by Lenasia (+850) and Randburg (+750).

Vandalism and cable theft also increase during load-shedding, “exacerbating the already dire situation”, the entity said. From Friday until Monday morning, City Power had 26 cable theft incidents.

“Cables that have been repaired after cable theft are also susceptible to faults during load-shedding because they have been weakened over time,” it added.

The scenario becomes bleaker in the longer term, the entity signalled.

“We do not, for safety reasons, do planned maintenance during load-shedding. So the longer it drags on the more problems we will have in future. Our mostly ageing infrastructure also cannot be ignored, and it's wear and tear increases every time they are switched on and off at short intervals.”

City Power said consumers could help reduce in-rush current by switching off heavy appliances during load-shedding. These include geysers, pool pumps, heaters, stoves. “These can be switched back on, gradually, a few minutes after restorations.”

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