Thread by @CityPowerJhb

#LoadsheddingUpdate

City Power customers have been experiencing many outages after loadshedding restorations and prolonged outages due to the higher stages of blackouts.

^DR

Loadshedding Stage 6 is causing more shocks and challenges for City Power, its systems and infrastructure, and by extension, the customers.

The main reason that is causing these trips is due to overloaded circuits. Simplified, tripping means the interruption in electricity supply which occurs when protective relays sense a fault, either from overload, equipment failure, cable fault or other factors.

The circuit breaker trips 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.

In some instances, overloading results in costly damages to the infrastructure - where we have transformers, minisubstations and cables burnt or

That's why it takes longer to restore power in some cases. Materials required for repairs are increasingly becoming difficult to source, as is gets depleted faster than we procure. For example, we have so far this year used 27 000 cable joints - .

an amount we used in three years in the previous years. We lose about R3.6m daily due to loadshedding, and the current higher stages of loadshedding do not help.

Most of our Medium Voltage infrastructure is operating on an abnormal configuration due to the high number of abnormal plants.

The normal situation is to have about 50 or less but currently, we have more than 500 plants that are out of service which is attributable to the relentless loadshedding episodes.

This is compounded by the fact that during loadshedding we are not able to do maintenance and as such are not able to keep up with the breakdowns which cause outages.

Since last month we have been hovering around Stages 4 to 6, with 6 being the highest Stage sustained most of this week, and it looks like it will go into the weekend.

The Eskom-aligned schedule we use during the higher stages of loadshedding, especially Stage 6 where we are now, forces some customers in certain blocks to be shed for 4 hours, instead of 2.

This also means that most customers are loadshed more than three or four times daily due to the number of blocks we are adding per outage schedule. This is beyond our control and we apologise.

These are some of the undesirable effects of Loadshedding, especially Stage 6, which unfortunately, we have to live with until Eskom's capacity challenges are over.

CEO Ms Tshifularo Mashava said: "The past few days have been the hardest for our customers and our employees whose sole duty is to keep the lights on and half the time are not able to.

The truth is that loadshedding is an undesired nuisance for our operations, and the higher stages including Stage 6 where we find ourselves currently, are worse.’’

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"While we try our best to increase capacity in different areas of our operations to offset what would have been a disastrous impact on our customers, we want to plead with the residents to play their part.

This includes those with energy storage facilities like batteries and UPS systems to enable the load to settle first before plugging them back on after loadshedding," added Ms Mashava.

City Power will continue to assist our customers to plan their lives better through the loadshedding schedules we share on different platforms including Councillors WhatsApp groups, social media and the website.

Half of the challenges we face can be reduced by the attitude change from our customers in terms of their consumption, especially as we enter the winter season.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this to our customers.

*ENDS*
Issued by City Power

Isaac Mangena, Spokesperson