City Power customers to be load-shed for just two hours a day

City Power has unveiled a plan that will see areas it serves getting power cuts for a maximum of two hours out of 24 during stages 1-7 of load-shedding.

This was revealed in a revised load-shedding schedule on Thursday, which the entity says aims “to alleviate the pressure on its customers” by reducing the “frequency of blackouts and ensuring minimal disruption”.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena is confident the new schedule will work. It kicks off during the first week of June and has been communicated to Eskom and regulators. 

“This approach seeks to ensure that the city's base load, sitting at 2.3GW, remains intact and is not compromised by the constant implementation of higher stages of load-shedding by Eskom.

City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava said with the new load-shedding schedule, customers will be relieved of some inconveniences as City Power will ensure that in a 24-hour period, each block appears once per stage. This effectively means that each block serviced by City Power will be shed only once for two hours a day in a 24-hour cycle at stage one or higher,” Mangena said.

Mangena said the entity's technical team had been at work over the past few months to find ways to ease the burden of ongoing power cuts on customers and infrastructure.

“Our teams established that with the current load-shedding schedule, City Power has been giving Eskom enough to enable us to spread the load across and reduced a significant percentage of our peak load every time it is requested by Eskom.

“For instance, if one divides the number of blocks to 16, one will get about 160MW which will then give us options to exclude some customers and also be able to comply to give Eskom the required megawatts of about 125MW per stage.

“However, if one divides it by 24 blocks, one will get about 100MW which is less than the required megawatts needed to give Eskom per stage and will not also be able to accommodate any exclusion that we need to implement.”

Mangena said technicians had conducted simulations over the past few months to establish the viability of the plan, which will be introduced in phases, starting with  businesses and domestic customers.

Gradually, some industrial customers, businesses and essential services will be incorporated into the new schedule.

“We will start with network reconfiguration in the coming months which will enable the total exclusion of many embedded essential services such as water pump stations, hospitals and medical centres with life-support requirements as well as national key points reliant on electricity for their core operations.

“We move from the premise that we are not being fair to ourselves and our customers if we remain on the current load-shedding schedule. That is why we are reviewing not only the hours but megawatts we give to Eskom at any given episode of load-shedding.”

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