Since September 2020, the City of Cape Town has protected its customers through the use of the Steenbras Hydro Pumped Storage Scheme and to a lesser extent, its gas turbines for a total of 457 hours or an equivalent of about 19 full days.

The City notes with dismay the extension of Eskom load-shedding until 05:00 on Saturday, 30 October 2021. During the daytime, where capacity allows, the City is currently protecting customers with a stage of load-shedding (Stage 1) while at night, the City is able to postpone the start of load-shedding slightly for City customers to give an extra hour for businesses to operate and people to commute. This all depends on the generation capacity though and it is not a given. However, City customers are often the most protected in South Africa when there is Eskom load-shedding.

‘As we can see, the power situation is continually changing due to the problems at Eskom, even from one hour to the next. The City thanks its customers for their understanding. As a well-run city, investment and maintenance in infrastructure is done to ensure that assets such as the Steenbras Hydro Pumped Storage Scheme (SHPS) and gas turbines can be used to assist where possible. The City also uses the SHPS as a way to reduce the tariff impact on customers by typically generating when the Eskom tariff is at the highest, to reduce exposure to the highest Eskom tariff for City customers.

‘However, this amount of load-shedding is simply unsustainable. The City continues to call on National Government to expedite the processes related to independent power producers and the City remains committed to do everything in its power to reduce the heavy dependency on Eskom. We have made exciting progress in the independent power own build and procurement journey, but we do need legal clarity from the National Department of Mineral Resources and Energy as to what is allowed and what is not. We still await this,’ said the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Energy and Climate Change, Councillor Phindile Maxiti.

Let us know if your power stays off for longer than the load-shedding schedule.

Service requests typically increase during load-shedding.

Source: City Of Cape Town