The City of Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial capital, has asked Eskom for a three-day exemption from continuing outages to enable City Power to stabilise supply.
Flooding following recent heavy rains damaged power infrastructure and the city is unable to keep up with repairs, environment & infrastructure services department councillor Michael Sun said in a statement on Monday. Eskom is currently removing 5GW from the national electricity grid, resulting in outages of at least two hours three times a day.
“Given the urgent need for City Power to attend to the widespread and escalating faults, the entity has expressed its concern that load shedding is not only causing to additional faults and stress on the network, but also preventing the entity from being able to effectively attend to the outages and to stabilise the situation,” the city said in a statement. “It is a simple fact that power lines and infrastructure cannot be worked on when there is no power.”
The city is tending to more than 4 000 service calls resulting from damage to infrastructure that has left some areas without power for days. — S’thembile Cele, (c) 2022 Bloomberg LP