Candles and cold dinners will be the order of the day again on Tuesday as Eskom warned of further load shedding countrywide.
”Unfortunately there is load shedding today [Tuesday] again,” said spokesperson Andrew Etzinger, waiting for the power cut in his office in Sunninghill to roll over to another area while working on his laptop.
The latest cuts are due to the utility’s usual summer maintenance when electricity consumption is lower, combined with unexpected trips, leaving the utility with 24% less capacity than expected.
The power utility managed to get one large generator into service late on Monday and expects a second to be operational on Wednesday, but until then, power cuts will rotate around the country to prevent a total collapse of the strained grid.
The good news is that the cuts are expected to end on Thursday, a day earlier than initially estimated.
Etzinger asked electricity users who have found the cuts to be out of synch with the roster posted on its website to call Eskom’s help-line on 08600 Eskom (08600-37566).
”We try to make sure that load shedding happens within the published time period … but we must acknowledge things can go wrong and in certain cases they are going wrong,” said Etzinger.
Power flows through repaired equipment when it is restored, and if it doesn’t flow through all the lines automatically, a technician has to be sent out to rectify it, he said.
”We really need to know about this because we would not see it on our system.”
”We do our best to limit load shedding to two-and-a-half hours.”
He said the load-shedding portion of this was two hours, but an extra half hour was added to enable electricity to be restored. Sometimes this took a while, as equipment had to warm up again.
In October, Eskom warned that it is performing routine maintenance during the summer season and appealed to people to be use electricity sparingly. — Sapa