Cape Town residents kept on stage 4 load shedding as Joburg works on solutions

The City of Cape Town says it is still aiming to mitigate the impact of stage 6 load shedding for its residents “as much as possible”.

On Tuesday, Eskom confirmed that it would ramp up load shedding from Stage 4 to 6 due to the unlawful and unprotected protest action, which has caused widespread disruption to the utility’s power plants.

While stage 6 is set return on Wednesday from 4pm until 10pm, the metropolitan municipality explained that it has been building reserves to assist in the event of Eskom moving to higher stages of load shedding.

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As a result, this would enable the city to protect its customers from any load shedding above stage 4.

“This morning, a delegation from the City of Johannesburg and other officials toured the Steenbras Hydro Pumped Storage Scheme, which will be put into full operation as soon as higher stages of load-shedding above Stage 4 are announced,” Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis said in a statement.

“This will allow up to two stages of load-shedding relief where it is possible. The City has been ‘saving’ the capacity of Steenbras by not offering residents load-shedding relief for the past few days.

“This is because of the need to urgently use Steenbras at full capacity to protect infrastructure,” he added.

The city, however, had moved up to Stage 5 until 7pm following a gas turbines trip in order to meet peak demand.

Hill-Lewis said the metro would continue to put in place measures to protect “its operations and service delivery” from the impacts of load shedding.

“If high stages of load shedding continue, the threat to critical infrastructure and the suffering that will result from economic recession will, in my view, constitute an emergency similar to Cape Town’s 2017/18 drought and the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We will seek legal advice on whether it is appropriate to force the City to comply with all of the onerous requirements of procurement processes imposed by national legislation under these emergency circumstances,” the Cape Town mayor further said.

The city previously engaged with stakeholders in March for its first round of procurement of power from Independent Power Producers (IPPs).

City of Joburg

The City of Joburg has indicated that it is actively working on long-term solutions to load shedding.

Last year, the city considered taking legal action against Eskom for the ongoing blackouts.

“As the City of Joburg, we are not trying to re-invent the wheel, but rather take already established and functioning processes to ensure that our residents have reliable, sustainable, and affordable access to electricity,” Joburg mayor Mpho Phalatse said in a statement on Tuesday.

Phalatse said the metro was looking to “join hands with the City of Cape Town in partnering to advance energy independence”.

The Joburg mayor said its plans were part of the city’s commitments made to residents at its two-day Energy Indaba, which took place in May.

“There are no quick solutions, but on 1 July 2022, the rollout of a R1,6-billion capital investment, for the 2022/23 financial year, in City Power’s aged infrastructure will kick-in, so that we are able to upgrade and stabilise the City’s power network to avert the possibility of further breakdowns caused by Eskom’s rolling blackouts,” she added.

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Meanwhile, City Power has changed some of its load shedding blocks, which has been met by anger from Joburg residents.

“It is true that there are some of the blocks that have changed overtime during the course of our work.

“This happens often because, in our efforts to reduce the inconvenience due to the prolonged outages, we back feed some of the feeder boards from different network points.

“What happens is that some parts of our network is designed in a ring feed. When a fault occurs, part of the network is moved temporarily to a different source until the fault has been repaired, which may happen swiftly or take long,” City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena explained.

Mangena said the utility would will communicate any further changes to its customers and councillors whenever the load is moved from one block to the other.