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Following their scathing statement with regards to Eskom’s latest load shedding announcement, the City of Joburg has declared that it will not be load shedding its customers.
“Eskom yesterday announced that they will be implementing stage 2 load shedding due to capacity constraints until Monday. City Power recently signed an extension of a Power Purchase Agreement with Kelvin Power Station which gives us extra up to 220MW capacity to offset at least Stage 1 and Stage 2 imposed by Eskom,” said City of Joburg in their statement on Sunday.
The city also urged those who are experiencing outages to log a call with City Power in order for the city’s technicians to attend to the outages.
On Saturday evening, City of Joburg rejected Eskom’s scheduled Stage 2 load shedding.
“This is after the City recently secured additional power supply capacity of 220Mw from the privately-owned Kelvin Power Station that qualifies it for an exemption from stages 1 and 2 of load shedding,” said COJ on Saturday.
The City indicated that it had also written a letter to Eskom to notify it of this added capacity.
Joburg’s new executive mayor also described the planned load shedding as “an unwarranted decision that can not be left unchallenged on behalf of the people of Johannesburg.”
“When the City first reached out to Eskom to indicate our additional supply capacity, we asked for proof int his regard, which we accordingly presented,” said Moerane in a statement.
He added that the City did not hear back from Eskom and were just as surprised as the rest of the country to hear about the latest bout of load shedding.
The mayor accused the power utility of having no intention of serving the people of Johannesburg, even after COJ’s attempts to assist Eskom “after the national utility claimed it had left some mini substations and transformers unrepaired for months in mostly poor communities in Johannesburg.”
The mayor concluded by indicating that the City is even willing to go the legal route in its impasse with Eskom to halt what it calls “Eskom’s blanket heavy-handedness against the people of Johannesburg.”
Eskom on Saturday announced stage 2 load shedding due to a shortage of generation capacity. As such, load shedding will begin at 9pm on Saturday and continue until 5am on Monday.
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