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City Power has informed Johannesburg residents that stage 3 load shedding will begin at 5pm this Friday.
The regional power utility’s decision follows Eskom’s announcement of the reinstatement of power cuts, citing several breakdowns in their generation fleet.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said in keeping up with regulatory requirements, they will be rolling out load shedding across all areas of supply as per Eskom’s declaration.
“The list of blocks detailing the specific suburbs/area affected and the times they will experience load shedding starting this Friday will be shared shortly on our website and digital platforms.
“The announcement by Eskom comes after over 300 days of reprieve, which has, to some extent, allowed us to recover our network fleet and bring most of our plants back to service. We understand that load shedding can be disruptive as it usually brings added challenges of unplanned power supply cuts caused by damaged electrical infrastructure and household appliances,” Mangena said.
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Mangena added that load shedding exposed the city’s network to “prying thieves”.
“We therefore plead with customers to use electricity sparingly to avoid causing network overload – which was the reason we had to enforce load reduction in certain areas. We also appeal to customers to be on the lookout for any suspicious activities around our electricity infrastructure,” Mangena said.
Earlier, during an update on the country’s electricity generation performance, Minister of Electricity Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa said the country had been hit by a “perfect storm”.
“We’ve got hit by a perfect storm. So, what is that perfect storm? We’ve had units out for planned maintenance. But we had the situation where two of our best-performing power stations, Matimba and Lethabo, had a number of units failing at the beginning of the week. Other units were also delayed in coming back online.
“So as a result, for most of the week, we had to rely on our open cycle gas turbines (OCGT), essentially we were burning diesel,” Ramokgopa said.
Eskom CEO Dan Marokane said load shedding returning is a “potentially temporary setback”.
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