With South Africa once again in the grips of loadshedding, City Power Johannesburg has issued a statement voicing its concerns about Eskom and its slow work when it comes to restoring power and keeping to its own schedules.

“City Power would like to express its concern over the continued go-slow by Eskom employees which is impacting our customers negatively at a time the country is going through loadshedding. Our customers have in recent days been hard done when electricity is supposed to be restored after loadshedding, with many restored several hours after their scheduled restorations,” writes Isaac Mangena, Spokesperson for City Power.

City Power, which is owned by the City of Johannesburg and tasked with supplying electricity to region, points out that areas such as Randburg, Midrand and Lenasia have been particularly affected.

“Our areas in Johannesburg North that include Northriding, Windsor, have been the hardest-hit with customers going for 3 to 5hrs without power after they were loadshed.
These include a transformer at Windsor substation, and another at Olivedale substation which supplies power to parts of North riding. For example Windsor substation was today loadshed at 02h00 early morning and was due for restoration at 04h30. By 08h00 this morning it was not restored. Yesterday the same Windsor customers were shed at 14h00 and due to be restored by 16h30. But the customers were only restored just before 19h00 due to delayed restoration by Eskom,” Mangena adds.

Unfortunately this was not an isolated incident as something similar happened Olivedale substation with customers in that area having their electricity go out at 14:00 and only restored at 19:00. This is obviously far overdue for the current stages of loadshedding where restoration was supposed to happen at 16:30.

“Last week Eskom issued a statement acknowledging its challenges with its technicians’ response times, and confirming they are on a go-slow over overtime allowances. We call on Eskom to address its staff issues, or fix their system to enable them to operate loadshedding remotely instead of manually,” Mangena concludes.

These types of complaints are commonplace but we’re used to seeing them from the general public and not a big company involved in the grid and process of supplying electricity.

We also understand the frustration from the City Power as we check their feeds daily for loadshedding information and find it flooded with comments from customers who are left in the dark. The amount of resources City Power must be expending just on address customer complaints must be exorbitant which we’re sure fuelled the need to release this statement.

#Outageupdate #JoburgUpdate #JoburgServices #CityPowerUpdate
City Power would like to express its concern over the continued go-slow by Eskom employees which is impacting our customers negatively at a time the country is going through loadshedding. ^OS pic.twitter.com/DuljeRHcto

— @CityPowerJhb (@CityPowerJhb) November 10, 2021