Eskom has again announced that it would raise load-shedding to Stage 6 from 21:00 last night, going on overnight each day from 16:00 to 05:00 until further notice. Raised levels of load-shedding are a crisis for our municipality, affecting both the condition of our electricity network, as well as our ability to attend to outages.
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.
Residents are already aware that load-shedding can result in additional outages due to overloading of the network, as well as vandalism and theft of City of Tshwane 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.
The Energy and Electricity Department and the Regional Operations and Coordination Department’s electricity teams are working determinedly to face this immense pressure on our electricity network, but the reality is that our system was not designed to cope with this situation. The heavy rains we have been experiencing recently are also making this situation worse, with wet weather increasing the likelihood of equipment faults, and this situation is very serious for the entire Tshwane.
I must again request residents to be active in playing a role to help our City 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 then only 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 area. Making sure not to have energy-intensive appliances on during peak times (particularly in the evening from 18:00 to 21:00).
We continue to pursue long-term interventions to see what we as the City can do to alleviate this continuous challenge. In the interim, we all need to work together to best manage this difficult time.