Johannesburg- Power utility company City Power has explained the reasons behind the unplanned power interruptions that have been happening since the intensified loadshedding schedule was introduced.
The company said unplanned power interruptions are due to cable theft, illegal connections, overload, sabotage and vandalism on the Company’s infrastructure and appealed to all law abiding citizen who witness an illegal connection, disconnection and ay form of sabotage to report the matter on their hotline.
Said the company, “Illegal connections can cause death or fire, Don’t be unplugged report illegal power connections anonymously on: 0800 002 587.”
According to third website planned outage is a power interruption that occurs when City Power switches off electricity supply at a substation or other portion of the network in order to execute maintenance and /or emergency duties to correct defects in the network so that it functions at its maximum potential while Unplanned Outage means the unavailability of the unit in the Power Plant without being the status of Planned Outage.
Majority of the recently damaged infrastructure is due to the December floods that let Johannesburg with a bill of R421 million to address the trail of destruction.
Last week City Power announced that its workers were burning the midnight oil to clear the backlog of damaged infrastructure.
At the time of writing, the company said they had cut down the backlog from 5000 to 2000.
Meanwhile, the company has reported that it has advanced its plans to terminate its over-reliance on the Eskom parastatal through turning to other sources of energy providers.
The power distributor has reported that the relationship between itself and Eskom was leading them to lose R3.6million every day due to load shedding.
Speaking to the media, City Power Spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the company was moving away from Eskom.
“Not completely moving away but have options for electricity replacements like gas and solar supply in the coming few years – [we’re] currently in the process of recruiting assistance for this,” Mangena was quoted saying.
