'Power back in whole of Tshwane by Thursday night,' says MMC

The City of Tshwane says its electricity teams have found a technical solution to work towards restoring all areas affected by the pylon collapse on the Njala line on the N4 highway. 

The pylon collapse left parts of Pretoria north without electricity.

The MMC for utility services and regional operation and co-ordination, Themba Fosi, said the city has continued to restore power to areas affected.

“I am very pleased to share that our technical teams have come up with a solution that, once implemented, will allow for the restoration of all areas affected by the outage. Originally it was thought that this was going to require a system of load rotation in the entire affected area, but our technicians managed to balance the system in a manner that should allow us to restore all areas without load rotation, pending any possible problems,” said Fosi.

However, Fosi has cautioned that in areas where power has been restored, there might be possible trips as they balance the system to ensure the network can provide for all customers. 

“To this end, I’d like to ask that residents use electricity as sparingly as possible, particularly around evening peak periods from 5pm-9pm. With the addition of load-shedding stage 6, I know this is going to put pressure on residents but we need to be careful with electricity usage until the full installation of the replacement pylons can take place. Should residents experience power failures after their power is restored, I ask that they report it to the city’s call centre so we can get teams to work on any new localised outages,” he said.

Fosi said their expectation is that all areas affected by the original outage should be restored by Thursday evening.

“But we are continuously working to restore areas, and new areas are being returned to service every few hours. This makes giving a current list of restored areas difficult as we keep getting more areas online,” he said.

He said his hope is that areas still without power, like parts of Mamelodi and the various industrial areas affected, will be restored in phases by latest Thursday evening as per the expectations of the technical teams. 

“However, I must caution that stage 6 load-shedding has come at the worst possible time and it will put immense pressure on this repair work and the electricity teams working across the city on outages. The reality is that this could cause unwanted delays and I need customers to understand that risk.

“If it does cause delays, I will keep open communication and explain where we are in the restoration efforts and what our teams are doing to ensure all restoration happens,” Fosi said.

Fosi said the city will continue to do everything it can to restore electricity to customers.

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