The Nelson Mandela Bay council approved a number plans to mitigate the effects of the rolling blackouts on the local economy.
These include installing advanced metering systems in homes and businesses to reduce and limit electricity consumption.
The new, advanced systems will soften the blow against rolling blackouts.
It is also set to improve the metro’s revenue collection from the sale of electricity.
The new system to engage load limiting was rolled-out to 8 000 households, thus far.
MMC for Electricity Lance Grootboom says this will ease 55 to 60 megawatts on the grid during rolling blackouts.
“So, this will be remotely controlled the same way we do with our geysers, for households will have reduced load during load shedding but heavy appliances will not be operating. In terms of business, we want to protect them even further by introducing load curtailment so which would mean that they use less energy by switching off non-essential appliances. We do currently have voluntary load shedding in our industries but we believe this will assist to a degree of limiting short-time on production.”
Grootboom says with the installation of the new meters, the Metro hope to curb electricity theft.
“So, we need to make sure that we reduce the amount of electricity stolen from our city because we are losing close to a billion rand so how do we deal with this, our teams are going door to door to ensure that we get those households to account and we install these new systems so that we can get our revenue collection.”
The Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber says load limiting and curtailing will have a ripple effect on manufacturing industries in the city.
The CEO of the Business Chamber, Denise Van Hussysteen says it is not as straightforward as it sounds.
“We welcome any move that seeks to reduce the impact of load shedding on our local economy, the metro is an investment on manufacturing hub for the province however we need to define what load curtailing is and how it will be implemented across various businesses because some will benefit from load curtailing but some are need power to produce components so many of them are comfortable in voluntary load shedding.”
The metro will engage independent power producers as part of its mitigation strategy.
The city also plans to revive its 50 megawatt gas turbine powered generating unit.
