Lights out for Ekurhuleni as Eskom takes over load shedding

Power utility Eskom says that it will take over the load shedding of customers in the City of Ekurhuleni after the city failed to comply with the rules and regulations governing the outages.

According to Eskom, the city has been failing to reduce the required load during a system emergency.

“The decision to take over load shedding in Ekurhuleni follows monitoring and analysis conducted by Eskom, which indicate that the City of Ekurhuleni is not reducing the load as per (the regulations),” it said.

Eskom said it had engaged the municipality on numerous occasions regarding its failure to load shed customers, and so now the action will be under the power utility’s control, effective Tuesday, 24 July.

The city was previously only permitted to load shed all substations that feed critical loads. However, upon its request, Eskom handed over the implementation of load shedding of all customers in the municipality.

“Although Eskom notes the city’s technical challenges in executing load shedding, it is left with no choice but to implement load shedding for the city as its non-compliance puts further strain on the already contained national grid,” Eskom said.

“Failure to implement load shedding by municipalities affects the integrity and stability of the grid, which may lead to higher stages of load shedding.”

Eskom was forced to push load shedding to stage 5 on Monday as pressure mounted on the grid. Load shedding has been reduced to stage 4, but is sticking to that level indefinitely.

Eskom appealed to members of the public to continue to assist in reducing load shedding by curbing their power usage.

It said that it would continue to load shed customers in the City of Ekurhuleni based on the municipality’s load shedding schedules.

Schedules 

For people living in the major metros, load shedding schedules are available here:

• City of Johannesburg
• City of Ekurhuleni 
• City of Tshwane 
• City of Cape Town (PDF)
• Nelson Mandela Bay
• eThekwini
• Manguang
• Buffalo City

For access to other load shedding schedules, Eskom has made them available on loadshedding.eskom.co.za.

Smartphone users can also download the app EskomSePush to receive push notifications when load shedding is implemented, as well as the times the area you are in will be off.

Read: Eskom’s key tool to stop stage 8 load shedding comes at a great cost to South Africa