The City of Johannesburg has implemented a project which they hope will substantially reduce load shedding.
The project will only affect households with Smart meters, of which there currently are 63 000, but the city hopes to install as many as 330 000 in the near future.
The system which is currently known as ‘load limiting’ will work as follows:
• The city sends a sms to the customer to inform him to reduce power usage
• If customer reduce usage before load limiting time they will not experience the imposed reduction
• If customer does not reduce usage they will experience a 30 second power failure in order to give them a chance to switch of certain appliances.
• If there is still no power reduction, there will be another power outage for 30 seconds.
• If the customer still does not obey the instruction their power will be cut for the duration of the load shedding period.
Effectively this gives the customer the advantage of being able to run at least certain appliances rather than having no electricity supply as per the ‘traditional’ load shedding.
The system if adhered to will save the city as much as 153MW of electricity.
