How Joburg’s load-shedding schedule migration affects you

A two-hour load-shedding schedule is better for the economy and Johannesburg’s ailing infrastructure than the four-hour schedule previously adopted by the City of Johannesburg, the DA caucus in the metro has said.

DA councillors were grappling with the idea following City Power’s announcement that the power provider had migrated from the four-hour load-shedding schedule to a two-hour schedule from last week Friday.

This followed a request by City Power for Eskom to align its load-shedding schedule with this.

Eskom commenced load shedding again this week, this time due to wet coal affecting power generation. But the new load-shedding schedule has caused confusion, with my taking to Twitter to ask the city to clarify gaps in the schedule during stage 2 load-shedding on Tuesday night.

ALSO READ: Eskom upgrades load shedding to stage 3 from Wednesday

City Power announced that load shedding would commence at between 10pm Tuesday night and end at 5am on Wednesday morning. But residents took to Twitter to complain that the schedule only showed some suburbs’ schedules as from midnight, omitting which suburbs would be affected by load shedding at 10pm.

#Loadshedding #Stage 2 loadshedding will commence at 22h00 until 05h00 tomorrow morning

Please check your shedule at https://t.co/3X45hC02u3 ^LP pic.twitter.com/D6cxzJRyW1

— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) February 9, 2021

On Wednesday afternoon, stage 3 load shedding commenced at 1pm, with some residents only getting a three-minute warning before lights went out. Some residents complained that getting load shedding twice would be a major inconvenience.

I’m on block one and we have loadshedding twice. The worse time to get loadshedding is in the morning from 04:00 to 06:30 when people need to get ready for work but they don’t have power. Whoever does this planning shouldn’t have a job ????

— ????. ???????????????????????? ????✝️☪️???? (@RNaidoo) February 10, 2021

Former mayoral committee member (MMC) for infrastructure, Nico de Jager, said though residents were complaining that they would rather have the four-hour schedule than the new one, ultimately the city’s infrastructure, businesses and people’s daily needs would be better met by the power going out for two hours at a time, rather than longer.

The risk of repeat trips and pole damage was higher, as was cable theft and damage to transformers, the longer outages lasted. Longer power outages also led to economic loss as businesses may lose entire business days to the load-shedding schedule.

ALSO READ: Load shedding: Expect billions more in hidden costs due to infrastructure damage 

Over the last two years, the City of Johannesburg has seen an increase in the number of reported faults following periods of load shedding, a trend which De Jager warned would cost billions in infrastructure damage in the long run.

A 2020 report by the entity showed that City Power incurred a direct financial loss of over R58 million as a result of load shedding between 16 October 2019 and 5 January 2020, due to intermittent load shedding during that period.

“ The in-rush current required when the power returns after a four-hour outage is much higher than that required after two hours,” said De Jager.

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