The sudden jump between different power cut stages is making it difficult for businesses to plan ahead, undermining productivity, the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
“We have had two days where stage one blackouts suddenly became stage two blackouts,” the chamber’s president Janine Myburgh said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“We have also had cases where scheduled load shedding was not applied.”<\/p>\n
It would be better if outages were more predictable so commerce and industry could work around them.<\/p>\n
“In a simple office situation you might know that your computers are going to be down for a two-hour period in the morning so you could schedule your staff and other meetings for this down-time,” she said.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Eskom implemented stage one power cuts, which ended at 2pm instead of the planned 10pm, due to lower power consumption.<\/p>\n
Stage one allows for up to 1000MW of the national load to be cut, stage two for up to 2000MW, and stage three for up to 4000MW.<\/p>\n
Eskom said the system would continue to be under severe pressure for the rest of the week and that the risk of rolling blackouts would remain medium to high.<\/p>\n
Blackouts due to economic growth: ANC<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Eskom wants to charge more for peak demand<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n