Inaccurate load shedding schedules shed no light on outages

However, these schedules provide nothing but frustration when they do not correlate with the outages.

The forced power outages at the weekend left the public even further in the dark due to sporadic outages that did not correspond with the published load shedding schedules.

Several areas were plunged into darkness despite not being scheduled for load shedding, spurring residents’ ire.

Both Eskom and City Power received several queries and complaints on social media following the inconsistent outages.

City Power said municipalities received their load shedding schedules directly with Eskom and any discrepancies should be taken up with Eskom.

Meanwhile, according to Eskom’s spokesperson Andrew Etzinger, while larger municipalities typically developed their own schedules and did not receive them from Eskom, City Power was a special case.

“They have a completely integrated schedule with Eskom, meaning that the Eskom and City Power schedules cannot be separated and must be run as a single unit. This schedule is determined by consensus between Eskom and City Power.”

However, Eskom did acknowledge that there may be discrepancies between the schedules and the outages.

“Most networks do not coincide exactly with area boundaries, such as suburb boundaries. So, there will always be a margin of error, because two customers living in different parts of a suburb can be fed by different networks which are switched off at different times,” Etzinger said.

He added that in isolated cases the engineers had to switch networks differently from the plan, for operational reasons.

“We try to minimise this as much as possible and stick as closely as possible to the published schedules. We are also working on ways to inform customers when we have to deviate from the published schedules.”

On occasion, the power is off for longer than stated in the published schedules, which usually occurred when the engineers attempted to switch the power back on and the remote control switches did not operate or a surge in the current resulted in network faults, he said.

In both instances, field staff had to resolve the problem manually.

Furthermore, sometimes load shedding coincides with planned or unplanned outages and customers find it difficult to distinguish between these.

According to Etzinger, there were three stages of load shedding, which were implemented based on the extent of the shortfall on the power system.

• Stage 1: Up to 1 000 MW

• Stage 2: Up to 2 000 MW

• Stage 3: Up to 4 000 MW

The amount of times load shedding would be experienced per week would increase as the stages increase.

Customers must visit the load shedding web page (loadshedding.eskom.co.za), MYapp or contact the call centre on 086 003 7566 to obtain the correct schedule.

The stage of load shedding would be noted on the landing page and the customer must choose the correct stage view, or the information would be misleading.

Municipalities were expected to share their load shedding schedules with their customers and the information should be made available on the municipalities’ websites.