Residents of the City of Johannesburg were outraged on Friday when rotational power cuts did not correspond with City Power’s stage 2 load-shedding schedule.
Frustrated citizens took to social media to find out what was going on, only discovering hours after load-shedding started on Friday that City Power had overhauled its schedules.
Block designations had been renumbered, with blocks 1A to 8A losing the “A” and simply becoming 1 to 8, while blocks 1A–8A became 9 through 16.
In addition, load-shedding was now scheduled in two-and-a-half-hour intervals, where previously each block was load-shed for four hours at a time.
Based on one of City Power’s posts on Twitter, it has essentially appropriated Tshwane’s load-shedding schedule.
City Power’s switch from four-hour load-shedding intervals to two-hour periods is curious, as the organisation told MyBroadband in January that it was impossible for Johannesburg to migrate to a 2-hour load-shedding schedule.
We chose four hours because of many reasons – including our capacity to manage it, the interconnectivity of our network, and the ability of our infrastructure to handle the load-shedding demand,” City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena told MyBroadband.
Mangena explained that in Johannesburg the grid is so interconnected as to make it impossible to switch off specific areas like Tshwane and Ekurhuleni are able to.
For example, if City Power switches off the Orlando substation it feeds into almost twenty other substations that may impact twenty suburbs or townships such as Lenasia, Eldorado, Mulbarton, Nirvana, and Mondeor.
Unlike other municipalities, we don’t have the luxury to separate our network blocks for now,” Mangena stated at the time.
Mangena also said that four-hour load-shedding was preferable as it spares the senescent municipal electrical infrastructure the stresses of being switched off and on regularly.
“By its nature, electricity infrastructure is not meant to be switched on and off,” he said.
Our aging infrastructure won’t stand two-hour frequent switching. Already, we have a challenge of substations blowing up due to on and off of load shedding.
On 19 January, City Power told MyBroadband that it had no plans yet to adapt its load-shedding schedule, though it noted that it had received a number of suggestions. If anything changes, we will involve our customers and communicate accordingly,” City Power promised.
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Source: mybroadband
