South Africa has slid back into stage 6 loadshedding and, for people in certain parts of the country, this could mean four hour sections of outages according to City Power.

City Power is an energy services company owned by the City of Johannesburg and residents of the city look to its Twitter account and website for updates about everything involving electricity.

It’s on this Twitter account that City Power has apologised for these outages, but has done nothing about them.

“Dear Customers. According to the Eskom-aligned schedule, we have realised that during the higher stages of loadshedding, especially Stage 6 and 8, there will be some customers in certain blocks who will be shed for 4 hours, instead of 2hrs. We apologise for this,” the account reads.

There’s two issues with this statement: the fact that it is worded as some kind of mistake, and the fact that the four hour outage isn’t even accurate.

Starting with the wording and it has been shown today that the extended loadshedding blocks for unfortunate areas are not a mistake but will actually continue. As schedules were updated today when stage 6 was announced again, the longer periods returned.

For the affected areas this is simply the new normal under stage 6. While City Power doesn’t give a full list of affected blocks, it does states that most blocks between 1 and 16 are affected with the exceptions of blocks 7 and 11.

The second problem with the “apology” is that the loadshedding experienced by these blocks do not last for four hours, but a whopping four and a half hours.

It seems that City Power may be sorry for what is happening but can’t really do anything about it as Eskom calls the shows when it comes to power delivery.

As always we recommend that people all across the country, not just in Joburg, make use of the great EskomSePush app on Android and iOS that will provide live updates on loadshedding schedules.