Making matters worse is City Power’s controversial load-shedding schedule which started earlier this month when the entity took over management of load-shedding from Eskom.

City Power was forced to revise the schedule after an outcry from frustrated residents.

The utility denied it had implemented a higher stage of load-shedding than that announced.

“All municipalities and Eskom are guided by Nersa’s [National Energy Regulator of South Africa] code of practice when implementing load-shedding. This is for equitable distribution of the burden of rotational power supply cuts to save the national grid from potentially collapsing.

“Under the code, municipalities are required to give 5% of shedded power supply to Eskom per stage. During stage 1, City Power gives Eskom 120MW of electricity per block through load-shedding. For example, on November 24, blocks 13, 2, 7, 12, 9 and 14 were shed from 12pm to 2pm.

“After that, from 2pm to 4.30pm, blocks 16, 11, 6, 1, 4 and 15 were shed. From 4pm to 6.30pm blocks 14, 9, 8, 3, 2 and 13, [were load-shed] with some repeating from the first load-shedding. Each block contributes 120MW during each episode of load-shedding.”

City Power clarified how its load-shedding schedule was divided, saying that it was done to comply with the regulations.

• stage 1: customers are load-shed once a day;
• stage 2: customers are load-shed either once or twice;
• stage 3: customers are load-shed twice or three times;
• stage 4: all customers are load-shed three times;
• stage 5: customers are either load-shed three or four times; and
• stage 6: customers are either load-shed four or five times a day.

“For customers who are load-shed four times, under the City Power load-shedding schedule they go off for eight hours. For those load-shed five times, they go off for 10 hours.

“This only occurs in higher stages of load-shedding. Through all this, industrial and business customers, and essential service, are excluded from load-shedding,” it said.

Source: TimesLIVE