Pretoria - Residents in Pretoria have been urged to play an active role during load shedding by turning off their appliances to minimise chances of extended outages.
MMC for utilities and regional operations Daryl Johnston made this plea to residents following this week’s announcement by Eskom that it would ramp up load shedding to stage 6, which meant that residents would experience rotational power outages at least two or three times a day.
According to Johnston, appliances that are switched on cause the power to trip minutes after it has been restored, resulting in extended outages in some areas.
He said residents should make sure they don’t have energy-intensive appliances on during peak times, particularly in the evening from 6pm to 9pm.
“Please turn off your appliances during load shedding, leaving only a light on to let you know when the power returns, and then only turn your appliances back on after some time has passed (10 to 20 minutes),” he said.
Johnston also pointed fingers at Eskom’s rolling blackouts for damaging municipal infrastructure and electricity networks, which were never designed to be continuously turned on and off.
“Our networks were never designed for load shedding, and continuously turning the network on and off has a major impact on the condition of our network infrastructure.
“Residents are already aware that load shedding can result in additional outages due to overloading of the network, as well as vandalism and theft of City of Tshwane infrastructure.”
He said as the frequency of load shedding increases, city resources would be stretched by just switching areas on and off.
“The same teams needed to perform this switching also play a critical role in electricity network repair and maintenance work, and they will have significantly less time available to work on restoring electricity for non-load shedding related outages.
“The Energy and Electricity Department and the Regional Operations and Co-ordination Department’s electricity teams are working determinedly to face this immense pressure on our electricity network, but the reality is that our system was not designed to cope with this situation,” he said.
The heavy rains experienced recently were also making the situation worse, with wet weather increasing the likelihood of equipment faults.
“I must again request residents to be active in playing a role to help our city manage this difficult time.”
Pretoria News