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Rolling blackouts negatively affecting power network, infrastructure: City of Tshwane

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The City of Tshwane says the ongoing rolling blackouts have a negative effect on its electricity network and power supply infrastructure.

The city says this inhibits its personnel’s ability to attend to routine power outage cases.

All the regions in the metro have been hit by the Stage 6 rolling blackouts, which Eskom introduced across the country on Tuesday.

City of Tshwane’s Mayoral Spokesperson Sipho Stuurman explains, “Unfortunately, Stage 6 load shedding means that all Tshwane regions will be affected by rolling blackouts for a minimum of 6 hours per day. These blackouts will be implemented in 2 or 3 stages per day. As we’ve frequently communicated, our electricity networks were never designed for load shedding and therefore, continuously switching off the network on and off has a major damaging impact on our infrastructure.”

Johannesburg preparing for the worst

Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, City Power says it cannot do any planned maintenance on its infrastructure as a result of the rolling blackouts.

City Power Spokesperson Isaac Mangena says the implementation of Stage 6 load shedding is placing massive pressure on already stressed electricity infrastructure and could lead to more power problems in the city.

“We are already battling under pressure with stretched resources, outage calls shooting through the roof, and multiple faults caused by load shedding. So, there are more problems that come with this load shedding, which include the fact that we are not able to conduct or do planned maintenance on our infrastructure during load shedding and it’s for safety reasons. This means that the longer load shedding takes, the more problems we have in the future with unmaintained infrastructure. So, with the Eskom’s unprotected strike seemingly far from over, we are preparing for the worst as City Power.”

Mangena elaborates in the video below: 

-Additional reporting by Pearl Magubane

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