The City of Cape Town says its electricity customers have been protected from more than 1 100 hours of the 1 900 hours of loadshedding implemented by State-owned Eskom between February and September this year.

"Where possible, the city has been able to protect its customers from up to two stages of loadshedding primarily through the management of the Steenbras Hydro Pumped Storage Scheme," says City of Cape Town Energy MMC Beverley van Reenen.

"The city is currently protecting customers again from loadshedding during the evenings. I am encouraged to see how much loadshedding relief (230 hours since February) we have been able to provide this year. We are only able to do this because we ensure our Steenbras plant is properly maintained and that we invest in our energy infrastructure for reliable services," comments Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.

The non-stop Eskom loadshedding, which has reached a record of 30 days straight, does impact on infrastructure. Much of the city's infrastructure, like household infrastructure, has not been designed to take non-stop loadshedding. This sometimes leads to loadshedding-related outages due to the sheer pressure on the network, Van Reenen points out.

"For example, where we are able to switch some areas automatically and remotely, sometimes the impact of the non-stop loadshedding means we have to send teams to switch areas on manually, which could affect response times. The city continues to enhance contingency measures," she adds.

Further, Cape Town also asks customers to switch off electrical appliances ahead of scheduled loadshedding to help prevent secondary outages when the power comes back on, which happens when an area’s power comes on and the system is overloaded owing to the electrical demand coming on simultaneously. Switching off can prevent outages after scheduled loadshedding, she said.

Meanwhile, the city has issued a tender that will see customers rewarded for reducing their power use at a given time so that city-supplied customers can be protected from the impacts of loadshedding. These Cape Town Power Heroes will be key in the city’s loadshedding protection efforts.

"The City of Cape Town also continues to build on its programme of ending loadshedding over time by focusing on energy diversification to enhance security of supply with the city’s own build projects, small-scale embedded generation programmes of buying excess power from qualifying customers, wheeling and independent power producer programmes," Van Reenen highlights.