Ward councillor starts petition to stop four-hour load-shedding slots

It was the problem of delayed power restoration in Linden, especially, that drove Ward 99 councillor Nicole van Dyk to throw her support behind a petition a fellow councillor formed to halt outages of longer than two hours at Roosevelt Park substation.

The trips, burnt cables, and issues with power being restored after four-hour load-shedding windows, are a clear indication that four-hour outages are not feasible for the substation. This is according to Ward 88 councillor Nicolene Jonker, who now has close to 2 500 signatures at the time of going to print.

“Roosevelt Park has it bad but many substations are struggling to cope, Randburg included,” Van Dyk said. “The infrastructure is suffering there is a potential disaster on our hands. At the very least we want City Power to engage with eskom about these four-hour load-shedding slots.”

Hursthill and Rosebank were two other substations that are suffering overload trips, that came to the ward councillor’s mind.

“Last year City Power did lots of maintenance on substations and mini-substation but now with stage six load-shedding the guys cannot do much maintenance because they cannot do it while the power is off.

Jonker said, “I created the petition due to the ongoing trips after another four-hour load-shedding session which has become all too frequent and untenable for residents. It is unacceptable that residents have to endure 30-hour periods before their power is restored. This puts so much strain on our local economy, not to mention people working from home who are terrified of losing their jobs.”

Spokesperson for the state entity Isaac Mangena said, “South Africa is facing an energy emergency.” Challenges in restoring power come from a myriad of reasons he said, one of which is because ‘resources get dispatched to physically restore power’. Add to that the overload trips.

“Tripping at a substation happens when the interruption of electricity supply causes a fault, an overload of power, equipment failure or other factors causes the circuit breaker to trip in order to isolate the faulty lines from the rest of the healthy sections.”

“This happens in order to avoid serious damage to the power infrastructure. To put the substation back online from an overload-triggered trip, the team must first balance the load. That’s why even after power has been duly restored, some areas will remain off until the in-rush current subsides.”

“Most of this is happening along the network and not the substation. We have close to 600 plants that are out of service across the City of Johannesburg, most of these in Hursthill including Roosevelt Park Substation.”

“What that means is we are operating at an abnormal configuration of the network. Because of load-shedding pressures, we are not able to maintenance work on those plants that are out of service.” “Furthermore, materials required for repairs are increasingly becoming difficult to source, as they are depleted faster than we can procure them. For example, we have so far this year used 27 000 cable joints – an amount we used over three years in the past.”

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Technicians cannot fix faults during load-shedding, which costs City Power R3.6m daily