The new mayor of Johannesburg Mpho Moerane has refused to implement Eskom’s load-shedding that was supposed to kick in on Saturday night.
Shortly after Eskom announced it was implementing load-shedding to beef up reserve capacity, Moerane issued a statement rejecting the schedule.
Only in the job for a few weeks, Mayor Moerane has put his foot down and refused to implement Eskom’s impromptu load-shedding schedule.
The mayor said Eskom’s load-shedding move was “an unwarranted decision that can not be left unchallenged.”
Eskom said it was implementing Stage 2 load-shedding from 21:00 Saturday until 05:00 on Monday in order to replenish emergency generation reserves for the week ahead.
For this to happen in Johannesburg, Eskom needed the city to do the actual switching on an off, but the mayor refused to do so.
“It looks like Eskom has no intention of serving the people of Johannesburg better after we as a municipality have done everything within our reach to ensure security of power supply,” said the mayor, just days ahead of the 1 November local government elections.
“We have recently gone as far as assisting Eskom after the national utility claimed it had some mini substations and transformers unrepaired for months in mostly poor communities in Johannesburg because it was out of stock.”
The mayor said the City of Johannesburg was “prepared to go the legal route to halt Eskom’s blanket heavy-handedness”.
On Sunday City Power, the entity charged with carrying out the load-shedding in Johannesburg, said it “would like to inform its customers that we are not going to be load-shedding” as directed by Eskom.
City Power recently signed an extension of a power purchase agreement with Kelvin Power Station, which it said gave it an extra 220MW capacity to offset at least Stage 1 and 2 load-shedding imposed by Eskom.
“We, therefore, believe that with this extra capacity, we will be able to cushion the residents of the city from the inconvenience of load-shedding Stage 1 and 2.
“Those experiencing localised outages should log a call with us so that technicians can attend to those.”
