Power cuts: Durban gets revised schedule
|Published
Photo: Sxc.hu Photo: Sxc.hu
Durban - In an effort to streamline the process and “minimise interruptions”, the eThekwini Municipality has released a revised load shedding schedule, effective from Wednesday.
It said in a statement that new requirements by Eskom, technical reliability, and feedback from customers had necessitated a revision of the existing schedule.
The aim was to switch off vast areas at the high-voltage sub-stations, each categorised as largely residential, commercial or industrial, with some overlap.
“It will also reduce the incidence of customer block changes due to network faults,” it said.
The municipality’s spokeswoman, Tozi Mthethwa, said in response to Daily News enquiries on Tuesday night that with the old schedule, some residents complained that they were always affected at a fixed time of day when most inconvenience was caused, while others were affected at more convenient times of the day.
“The schedule attempts to ensure that all communities are shed fairly on a rotational basis,” Mthethwa said.
“Consider a scenario of Stage 2 for an entire week, therefore, a customer will be affected in four different time slots for the week.”
Mthethwa said it must be noted that in the design of the schedule, as far as possible, the entire high voltage sub-station and neighbouring high voltage substations were included in the block.
“This will assist some customers (with regard to block changes because of network faults) but not eliminate all.”
Mthethwa emphasised the municipality was not able to say when load shedding would take place.
“The municipality acts on instruction from Eskom when an emergency situation arises that necessitates a certain amount of electricity load to be shed…”
For example, she said, Stage 1 required 1 000MW to be shed, Stage 2 required 2 000MW to be shed, Stage 3 required 3 000MW to be shed and Stage 4 required 4 000MW to be shed.
Daily News