Eskom declares emergency and implements load shedding

IN a media release on Thursday afternoon, eThekwini Municipality said the City was required to reduce its load by more than 450MW with immediate effect.  Residential areas will go out according to the load-shedding schedule, however, this was not sufficient to stabilise the network and the Municipality was forced to shut down Industrial and Commercial areas outside the published load-shedding schedule to accommodate the required 20% reduction.

“Please note that this is an emergency situation and the supply constraint is beyond our control. Customers in all areas are required to drop as much load as possible and switch off their appliances during the power outage,” read the release..

Areas including  Hillcrest, Kloof, Queensburgh, Jacobs and Malvern, had their power supply cut by eThekwini today in an effort to reduce usage as required by Eskom.

eThekwini’s Roy Wienand said the savings from the load shedding schedule alone is not enough. “We will use a schedule, so if it says that you are going to be off on the schedule, you will definitely be off. But in addition, additional areas might have to go off, that would have maybe been on day two or day three.

“We are only in day one and not everybody goes off on day one, it rotates over 24 and 48hours period. So additional customers will go off over and above day of the current schedule,” he said, in response to complaints from residents who have had their supply cut even though they are not in areas scheduled for loadshedding.

Eskom implemented rotational load shedding from 8am this morning, Thursday, 6 March after declaring an emergency at 6am this morning and requesting its key industrial customers to reduce load by 10 per cent..

Load shedding schedules are available at https://loadshedding.eskom.co.za/ for Eskom customers. Municipal customers need to contact their own municipalities for the correct schedules. Eskom customers can also contact the customer call centre on 0860 037 566.
Eskom has made an urgent appeal to consumers to switch off geysers, pool pumps and all non-essential appliances throughout the day to further reduce the impact of rotational load shedding.
In a media release today, Eskom said in anticipated that load shedding would continue until 10pm tonight, 6 March unless it received the necessary savings from its customers and the situation improved. Should this happen, load shedding would be terminated earlier.
Customers are cautioned to treat all electrical connections as live during this period. Eskom will provide regular updates on the status of the power system through all media platforms.
Eskom had declared an emergency at 06:00 this morning and asked key industrial customers to reduce load by 10%.

eThekwini Electricity’s Roy Wienand confirmed that for Durban, the standby schedule has already been implemented. Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger said seven days of heavy rain had left coal stocks wet and led to Eskom declaring an emergency.

The eThekwini load shedding schedule can be viewed here.