Warning over new load shedding schedules for Joburg
Joburg electricity utility City Power says it is working to iron out “glitches” that have cropped up while implementing new load shedding schedules in the city – but warned that issues will likely persist for a few weeks.
City Power took over load shedding operations from Eskom on Monday (6 November), which sees the utility now being responsible for the switching on and off of power in line with the national load shedding stages determined by the system operator.
As part of the transfer, the city and its surrounds – with a few exceptions – were put on new load shedding schedules of two-hour blocks, ending the four-hour block outages from before.
The group said that the new schedules also ensure that the utility is able to exclude essential services from load shedding – something that was not possible before.
However, there have been some challenges with the rollout, it said.
“Some blocks were load shed more frequently in a short space of time – some load shed twice in a space of eight hours,” City Power said.
“Our teams have been working hard since Monday to resolve the glitch.”
The group warned that the issue will persist across all 16 blocks in the weeks to come, and that each block will experience instances of short-space outages at least four times a month.
“In other instances, it may happen for two consecutive days, which was the case with the two blocks, 11 and 12, on Monday and Tuesday.
“It is worth noting that this is only happening at Stage 2 load shedding and may change during higher stages as the demands are also higher.”
The issues will continue until a permanent solution is found, it said.
“While this will be a temporary inconvenience, the positive is that the residents will have more days of electricity in a month, with some weeks going for up to three straight days without load shedding.”
It said its teams are currently working on technical solutions and will gradually address the problem to ensure there is no impact on customers in the long run.
In the meantime, the utility is issuing a weekly schedule of the blocks that will be affected by the problem.
These are the blocks affected this week:
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