Joburg’s City Power weighs plan to shed outages

Johannesburg’s City Power is in talks with Eskom to reduce outages.

City Power officials have proposed that the duration of blackouts in Johannesburg, home to more than five million people, be cut to two hours at a time to help businesses cope, spokesman Isaac Mangena said in an interview on Tuesday.

Authorities are also discussing alternative sources of energy supply, including solar and gas, as well as initiatives including converting street lights to solar power, he said.

“What we are working on is a plan to cushion our customers from the frequency of load shedding,” Mangena said.

“Currently you have customers being switched off for four hours at a time. That is killing a lot of people because you have no productivity for that period. So we have looked at the viability of reducing this to two hours,” he said.

High cost to economy

Eskom’s load shedding periods add up to as much as half a day because its dilapidated equipment can’t meet demand. The blackouts cost the economy 300 billion rand ($15.6 billion) last year, or about 5% of gross domestic product, the company said in a briefing this month.

Load shedding is forcing small businesses to cut production time and driving up costs, impacting their profitability.

A study by Nedbank Group Ltd., one of the nation’s biggest banks, estimates that two-thirds of small businesses in South Africa’s townships have shed jobs because of the power cuts.

They’ve also left City Power in “a very critical state,” with the company losing about 3.6 million rand a day because it has to constantly repair broken equipment and use additional staff to carry out load shedding, Mangena said.

An announcement on the plan to reduce the hours of blackouts in Johannesburg is expected to be made by mid-June, he said.

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