Cape Town mayor, Jordan Hill-Lewis, has criticized the last minute notice for load shedding by Eskom after the power utility was granted a 9.61% electricity price hike last week. Yesterday the power utility announced that stage 2 blackouts would be implemented from 5pm.
This is after multiple
generating unit failures occurred at the weekend, which severely reduced the
available generating capacity.
South Africans can expect electricity
outages from Monday 5pm until 5am on Tuesday. This will be repeated again from
9pm on Tuesday until 5am on Wednesday, Eskom said. However the power
utility said that load shedding would continue until Saturday.
The power utility expects
generation units to return to service over the next 24 hours; however, load
shedding will occur at short notice if there are any more significant
breakdowns.
Hill-Lewis slammed Eskom for
continuously halting South Africa’s economy. He said the economy could not grow
and alleviate poverty when prices continued to increase and electricity availability
continued to decrease.
The mayor concluded that this
was the reason why the City of Cape Town was going ahead to reduce reliance on
Eskom and increasing the amount of Independent Power Producers.
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