Tshwane: Higher stages of load shedding ‘a crisis’ for city infrastructure
The City of Tshwane says the ongoing stage 6 load shedding is wreaking havoc on its electricity network.
Tshwane’s MMC for Utilities and Regional Operations Themba Fosi says their networks were never designed to deal with constant power outages.
Eskom has been implementing stage 6 load shedding from Sunday “until further notice”.
“Raised levels of load shedding are a crisis for our municipality, affecting both the condition of our electricity network as well as our ability to attend to outages,” says Fosi.
“Our networks were never designed for load-shedding and continuously turning the electricity network off and on has a major impact on the condition of our network infrastructure.”
Fosi says the planned power cuts are causing severe damage to the electricity infrastructure.
“Residents are already aware that load shedding can result in additional outages due to overloading the network, as well as vandalism and theft of the City of Tshwane’s infrastructure. However, as the frequency of load-shedding increases, City resources will be stretched by just switching areas off and on.
“The same teams needed to perform this switching also play a critical role in electricity network repair and maintenance work and will have significantly less time available to work on restoring electricity on outages that are not related to load shedding.
“The heavy rains we have been experiencing recently are also making this situation worse, with wet weather increasing the likelihood of equipment faults. This situation is very serious for the entire Tshwane.”
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