Raised levels of load-shedding are a crisis for the Tshwane municipality, affecting the condition of its electricity network and its ability to attend to outages.
City of Tshwane MMC for utilities and regional operations Daryl Johnston made this comment on Wednesday after Eskom announced it will implement stage 6 load-shedding in the evenings.
Eskom announced that stage 6 will be implemented indefinitely until further notice after more generating units were affected.
“Stage 6 load-shedding means that rolling blackouts will affect regions of our city two to three times a day for a total time without electricity at a minimum of six hours per day.
“Our networks were never designed for load-shedding and continuously turning the network on and off has a major impact on the condition of our network infrastructure,” Johnston said.
He said residents were already aware that load-shedding could result in additional outages due to overloading of the network, as well as vandalism and theft of the municipality’s infrastructure.
“However, as the frequency of load-shedding increases, city resources will be stretched by just switching areas on and off.
“The same teams needed to perform this switching also play a critical role in electricity network repair and maintenance work, and they will have significantly less time available to work on restoring electricity for non-load-shedding related outages,” Johnston said.
Johnston requested residents to help the municipality manage this difficult time.
“Please turn off your appliances during load-shedding, leaving only a light on to let you know when the power returns, and only then turn your appliances back on after some time has passed (10 to 20 minutes).
“The surges generated as power is turned back on causes areas to trip minutes after having been restored, causing extended outages in some areas.”
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