City Power and the City of Johannesburg will not be load shedding in the city on Friday, following the application of a range of load limiting interventions.

“During this period of constrained supply, City Power will be getting excess capacity from the Kelvin power station and from the activation of load limiting in certain areas,” said City Power’s Hloni Motloung in a statement.

Load limiting allows City Power to remotely monitor household energy usage and curb excessive consumption using smart meters, while ripple control allows the utility to switch off energy-intensive geysers when the grid is under pressure.

A Johannesburg resident has lauded the “grace in the form of geysers that can be switched off remotely”. She adds: “It’s done in the night, and is not disruptive unless you bath very late… Occasionally the water is not very hot early in the mornings, but that’s not too bad.”

This comes after the City of Cape Town tweeted that there would be no load shedding in Cape Town on Friday. “The City of Cape Town will avoid load shedding today due to spare generation capacity,” said the tweet.

On Thursday the City of Cape Town also tweeted that its residents need not worry about blackouts.

“Despite Eskom’s call for load shedding, the city will not implement it due to its own spare generation capacity,” it said.

The rest of South Africa, however, will be subject to stage one load shedding on Friday, which Eskom said would be implemented from 8.30am and is likely to continue until 10pm.

This is due to increased electricity demand and a shortage of generation capacity resulting from technical faults at some of its power station units, said the power utility.

Eskom has asked consumers to use power sparingly as cold weather conditions are being experienced across the country. — Fin24