City complies with Eskom's load-shedding instructions
11 November 2021
The City fully complies with load-shedding instructions and national regulations in this regard. When the City offers protection to its customers by implementing a stage lower than that of Eskom, it is done by harnessing spare generation capacity from its Steenbras Hydro Pump Station, and not through non-compliance with the implementation of load-shedding as instructed by Eskom. The City’s protection of its customers has no impact on the national Eskom grid.
Furthermore, as mentioned the City is guided by the national standard for load-shedding, referred to as Regulation NRS048- 9. This regulation sets out the following criteria for the implementation of load-shedding:
- the safety of people
- the safety of the environment
- the potential damage to plants associated with a critical national product (wastewater treatment works)
- technical constraints on executing load-shedding
Therefore the City does exclude major hospitals, major central business districts with high concentrations of people and vehicles and areas where there are major crowds gathered for specific events.
The City of Cape Town is certainly not contributing to the Eskom woes. It is in fact a City that prides itself on its good maintenance of its grid, adherence to Eskom’s load-shedding announcements, mostly done at very short notice; and a City at the forefront of energy savings and making its operations more efficient. This, while expanding on its renewable energy focus to diversify the energy mix for cleaner and more secure supply.
The level of non-stop load-shedding is simply unsustainable to our residents and businesses and the South African economy as a whole.
Please note:
Eskom’s blackouts typically cause power faults due to nuisance tripping and increased service requests.
Please wait at least 30 minutes before logging a service request alerting the City that the power in your area has not come back after load-shedding. Sometimes, the issue is already being resolved. City teams will do their best to attend to any outages as soon as possible.
- Keep devices charged.
- Treat traffic lights that are out due to load-shedding as four-way stops. First to stop may proceed if it is safe to do so
City’s service channels (please only use one channel and don't log the same request multiple times):
SMS: 31220 (standard charges apply)
Email: [email protected]
Online: www.capetown.gov.za/
Be energy wise
- Turn the geyser temperature down to 60°C.
For more tips: https://savingelectricity.org.
Issued by Media Office, City of Cape Town, 11 November 2021
