Thread by @CityPowerJhb

#JoburgUpdates #HursthillSDC

City Power apologises to the residents of Riverlea for the power supply interruptions that
frequently occur in the area post loadshedding. ^LP

We are however concerned about the protest action in the area which will further exarcebate the situation as we may not be able to send teams into the area to attend to the
outages.

While we understand and appreciate the sheer frustration and inconvenience caused, it is unfortunate that residents have opted to embark on a protest action, which will worsen and lengthen the duration of the outage.

Our teams have managed to restore over 90% of power supply to Riverlea. However due to the ongoing mass action, City Power will not, out of concern for the safety of its staff, allow them to go back on site to finalise restoring power supply.

We have had incidents before where our operators and technicians were subjected to violence in similar situations.

We therefore appeal to the residents to suspend the protest in order to allow our teams to return to site and finalise restoring power supply.

The challenge that Hursthill Service Delivery Centre sits with at the moment in relation to Riverlea, is that power supply can only be restored gradually to balance the load and avoid further trips.

Due to the inrush current when power returns, particularly from a 4-hour loadshedding, the supply grid gets overloaded and automatically trips to avoid having a serious equipment damage.

That is why we often urge customers to uplug appliance before restoration.

We have also indicated that the high number of plants out of service also contribute to the problem of frequent outages. Hursthill SDC was sitting with close to 100 plants out of service last month, but now that figure has decreased to just over 70.

This shows that, despite our limited resources, we are committed to resolving our power supply challenges, including the one that residents of Riverlea and surroundings are facing.

**ENDS **