Don't charge inverters straight after load shedding, urges Eskom
The embattled power utility has now urged South Africans not to charge their inverters as soon as load shedding has ended.
Eskom's acting group chief executive Calib Cassim briefed the media on Thursday morning on the state of the national grid, and winter's impact on their operations.
"If the interventions that we have planned for the winter do not achieve the desired outcomes and your UCLF unplanned outages reach levels of 18 000 megawatts, then the likelihood of stage 8 load shedding during peaks is extremely high,” Cassim warned.
Eskom’s group executive of distribution Monde Bala said South Africans will have to conserve as much electricity as possible to avoid the implementation of stage 8.
“We believe that we can all reduce our electricity consumption just by using what you need. We need to switch off what we do not need at the time. We need to protect the infrastructure that we have, we need to stop the illegal connections and make payments of what we use.”
This as Eskom is entering the coldest season of the year with 3 000 megawatts less capacity, compared to the same period last year.
Bala added that the utility has noticed a new peak in electricity demand after loadshedding when backups are being charged.
“We have seen the phenom with the increase of the stages of loadshedding whereby immediately after loadshedding we are seeing a news peak now this is largely attributed to when the batteries charge up, so we are going to be running a program that seeks to shift the charging of the invertor systems to other periods and not immediately after loadshedding.
Meanwhile, Eskom’s Segomoco Scheepers said that loadshedding will be implemented between stage 3 and 5 until the end of August.
“We are going to have loadshedding ranging between stage 3 and 5 between now and the end of August.
“If we go up to 18 000 megawatts of breakdowns then there is likelihood that we will be at stage 7 loadshedding and potentially even stage 8 especially when we go into July and August as the demand gets higher.”
“This is going to be a very difficult winter and hence our plea to customers to reduce as far as they can to use only wat they need and this goes to households, business, industries and so on as we are in a difficult space and we all need to make efforts to contribute” added Scheepers.
ALSO READ
