City Power warns of the impact of loadshedding on its back ups
City Power warns that its back up batteries are not able to keep up with severe loadshedding.
Johannesburg power entity, City Power, says its teams are working tirelessly to address the increased failure of back up batteries at several major substations.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena says heightened Stage 6 of loadshedding has led to an increased number of logged outage calls.
"We have recently encountered many prolonged outages post loadshedding leading to an increase in outage calls from customers. The impact of loadshedding on our fleet of backup batteries is huge, coupled with the fact that some of them are old.
"The batteries have an eight-hour lifespan during loadshedding downtime and are meant to play back-up during the blackouts and assists when we restore power remotely."
In the latest incident, Roodepoort has felt the negative impact after the Nursery substation did not come back online following loadshedding on Thursday.
"The recent impact of the batteries problem was felt in Roodepoort on Thursday the 12 January 2023 which saw our open customer calls spiking from 575 in the morning to 909 by late evening due to Nursery substation which did not come back after loadshedding.
"On investigation we found that the reason for the substation to trip after load shedding was the increased wear-and-tear on the aged batteries at the substation.
"The substation is one of our first priorities in our battery replacement programme, but it will take a couple of weeks to resolve due to long lead times for the delivery of batteries," says Mangena.
The Nursery substation is feeding six other substations downstream which are William Nicole, Fieldhouse, Jan Smuts, Florida, Mechanical Workshop and Maraisburg.
Mangena adds that seven substations will be prioritized on the battery replacement program.
"We will also prioritize William Nicole, Jan Smuts, Maraisburg, Mechanical Workshop, Reefhaven, Penny Street and Manufactaon substations on our battery replacement program. We once more request our communities to be patient while we are working hard through the challenges to ensure availability of supply to Roodepoort customers.
"The Roodepoort area is still recovering from the devastating effects of the December 2022 adverse weather, consistent high stages of load shedding and persistent high rate of theft and vandalism."
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