Johannesburg City Power has said load shedding by Eskom depletes its electricity storage capacity leading to extended blackouts, which go on for up to 12 hours.
This is after residents in the north of Johannesburg complained about extended outages, the latest having started from 10pm on Sunday to about 11am on Monday.
City Power spokesperson, Isaac Mangena, said on Monday the impact of load shedding on its fleet of backup batteries was huge, coupled with the fact that some of them were old.
He said the batteries had an eight-hour lifespan during load shedding downtime and were meant to play back-up during the blackouts and assist when the entity restored power remotely.
"Rampant load shedding, especially at the higher stages we find ourselves in, is exposing our aged network, especially the substation batteries. Most of our substations that do not come back after load shedding is due to the batteries, which are unable to last for four hours load shedding to enable for remote switching, forcing us to send operators around to manually do fault finding and switch on the network," said CEO Tshifularo Mashava.
Mangena confirmed that the recent impact of the batteries problem was felt in Roodepoort on Thursday, the 12th of January 2023, which saw open customer calls spiking from 575 in the morning to 909 by late evening due to the Nursery substation, which did not come back after load shedding.
"On investigation, we found that the reason for the substation to trip after load shedding was the increased wear-and-tear on the aged batteries at the substation. The substation is one of our first priorities in our battery replacement programme, but it will take a couple of weeks to resolve due to long lead times for the delivery of batteries," he said.
The Nursery substation is feeding six other substations downstream, which are William Nicole, Fieldhouse, Jan Smuts, Florida, Mechanical Workshop and Maraisburg, which explains why the impact was huge, leading to calls spiking to almost a 1000.
City Power said it would prioritise these substations on its battery replacement programme.
Mashava said City Power was working hard to address the increasing failure of the back up batteries at several of its major substations, which was the reason for extended outages after load shedding.
"City Power has a plan to ramp up the repairs of the battery system and the replacement of the old batteries to ensure we cut down on interruptions after load shedding. We are currently not having enough budget to address all the substations, but we are moving funds around to address the most critical areas," Mashava said.
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