Confusion, frustration as City Power implements new load-shedding schedule

There seems to be confusion about the new City Power load-shedding schedule after the City of Johannesburg power utility took over from Eskom.  

Residents are experiencing longer hours without power since the city started to control its own load-shedding schedule.  

The city announced on Sunday it will take the responsibility away from Eskom and implement a new load-shedding schedule which would see customers without power for only two hours until stage 8.  

This was to ensure the city was able to decide where to load-shed while adhering to the megawatts requirements of Eskom in the event of the system being under serious strain. 

Environment and infrastructure services (EISD) MMC Jack Sekwala said the city will work hard to protect residents from load-shedding.  

The new schedule was implemented from Monday with certain expectations to be achieved. It was expected to eliminate four-hour blackouts and maintain two hours up to stage 8, reducing the frequency of load-shedding. In a five-day period, customers were likely to be shed only once between stages 1 and possibly 3. Customers would not be shed at the same time two or three days in a row.  

However, shadow EISD MMC Nicole van Dyk said there was a lot of inaccuracy and inconvenience to residents with the new schedule. Van Dyk said she had been receiving complaints from all over the city with lots of areas being shed for four hours.    

She said City Power's statement insinuated that despite the stage of load-shedding, residents would only have two hours of load-shedding a day.

“The new schedule was only uploaded at about 7pm [on Sunday] which doesn’t give residents time to prepare or adjust and this is a serious issue,” she said.  

Johannesburg north ward 134 councillor Devon Steenkamp said residents were confused and frustrated about the changes. 

There was a clear need for more detailed information on how areas are categorised and which zones they fall in.  

“The changes have made the schedule similar to a challenging puzzle that is difficult to decipher, contributing to residents' anxiety. The discrepancy between City Power's operational language, which uses substations instead of block numbers, is adding to the complexity.

“We are concerned about whether City Power will be able to efficiently manage fault-finding and address outages promptly, especially during higher stages of load-shedding when the time between slots is limited. It's imperative that City Power provides clear guidance and support to help residents navigate this new system effectively,” he said

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the entity was aware of customers concerns', especially in the northern suburbs.

“There have been technical errors during the onboarding of the new schedule because of the midnight overlapping transition. We are rectifying that and we should be able to allocate the blocks correctly in the new schedule later on Monday.”  

There were 16 blocks and a block would only repeat after all the blocks have been load-shed in a day.  

“For example, if you were shed from 8am to 10am in block 4, the other 15 blocks will need to be shed before we return to block 4 again. We suspect it is part of the bigger error which we are fixing. We apologise to the customers for the confusion,” he said. 

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