- After a spate of brutally bad weather which includes intense thunder storms and heavy rain over the past week, the city of Johannesburg finds itself playing catch-up on trying to fix knocked out power transmission and distribution infrastructure.
“Thirty per cent of the grid has been severely affected with major problem areas being Roodepoort, Hursthill and Randburg (substations which impact multiple areas). They have extremely old infrastructure that is very susceptible to failure. We can’t pinpoint the exact amount of people but approximately 4,000 households and businesses have been affected,” said the city in a statement.
As a result, the Executive Mayor, Mpho Phalatse has on behalf of City Power submitted an urgent request to Eskom for exclusion from load shedding for a period of 72 hours to clear the current and increasing backlog,” said Nickolaus Bauer, a deputy director of communications for infrastructure in the city.
Eskom has problems of its own. Of the total 44000MW generation capacity, Eskom, currently recently reported it has 4984MW on planned maintenance, while another 19052MW of capacity is unavailable due to breakdowns. Stage 4 to 6 loadshedding is implimented on a rotational basis indefinitely by the state owned energy utility making the mayors request somewhat impossible. Read more
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
