Johannesburg residents have lashed out at City Power for its delayed response times to power outages, outside of the load shedding schedule.
The ongoing load shedding crisis, caused by Eskom’s failing coal-fired power plants, has put immense pressure on City Power to provide uninterrupted power supply to its customers.
Households across the City have reported extended periods of power outages, with some waiting for more than 24 hours for technicians to address the issue.
With load shedding now having become a part of everyday life, power outages outside of the load shedding schedule has become immensely frustrating to residents.
In recent months, scores of households and businesses alike have had to endure endless unscheduled power outages.
This has resulted in many having to veer of their daily routines to get through the day.
Johannesburg resident Sharon Naidoo says the struggle of dealing with both load shedding as well as unplanned outages is having a negative effect on her life.
“It is extremely frustrating having to wait patiently for the power to switch on and only to discover that there is an outage. It’s bad enough we have to manage our lives around the load shedding, we now have to keep our fingers crossed that the power is actually restored as per the public schedule. Being without power for long periods of time not only affects our livelihood because we can not complete our day to day activities, it also poses a high risk to our safety and security.”
Another resident and small business owner, Akhil Jaynath, says his day to day operations have been severely hampered by unplanned outages.
“As a small business owner within the hospitality industry, I would say that the power outages are really affecting us negatively. We are trying to work around the hours of the load shedding we are provided with but now with the extra additional outages, it is just making business very difficult and most of our livelihood depends on the equipment we are using in order to create a service and get paid for it and it is not only affecting myself but the workers within my establishment. I have to put them on short time and cut wages just to make ends meet which is becoming really difficult because we don’t know how much longer the business can survive on these kinds of outages during working hours.”
Johannesburg’s City Power has passed the buck on to Eskom, saying the unplanned outages are a direct result of load shedding negatively impacting its aging infrastructure.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena says, “Load shedding stage 6 is causing more shocks and challenges for City Power, it’s systems and infrastructure and by extension our customers. The main reason that is causing these trips is due to over-loading of the circuits. When we simplify the tripping of the network it basically means that an interruption of electricity supply which occurs when the protective relays sense a fault, either from the over loading of the equipment or equipment failure, cable fault or any other factor. The circuit breaker then trips in order to basically isolate the faulty lines from the rest of the healthy sections. This happens to avoid serious damage to the power infrastructure.”
Mangena says it’s not only the residents who are being affected and that the power entity is loosing R3.6 million daily due to load shedding.
“We lose about R3.6 million daily due to load shedding and the current higher stages of load shedding really does not help. Most of our medium voltage infrastructure is operating on abnormal consideration due to the higher number of abnormal plants that we have on our network. The normal situation is to have at least 50 planned out of service, but currently we have more than 500 plants that are out of service which is attributable to the relentless load shedding that we are currently experiencing.”
