A way out of load-shedding in Cape Town?

You still wonder how Cape Town total blackout looks like? Thi city does. And decided to put an end to load-shedding. Find out how here.


You still wonder how Cape Town total blackout looks like?

Just have a look on that video:

Now imagine it lasting 2 full weeks? It would be a disaster for the city and its residents. To prevent this to happen, the City of Cape Town is currently discussing solutions. Two of them seem to be realistic.

 

  1. Electricity generators

The city is considering the approval of a R245m special budget to buy items producing electricity, especially generators. They would only provide electricity for limited city services, such as the Airport and the railway.

In partnership with key players like the Cape Town International Airport, the Cape Town harbour, the Metro train service, Prasa and Eskom, the municipality estimates that the city would not be completely paralyzed if a complete and long load shedding happens. However, generators can only produce electricity with fuel, so the next issue to deal with is the quantity of fuel available when the time comes.

 

  1. IPPs – Independent Power Producers

In addition to load-shedding, municipalities are subject to Eskom yearly tariff increases which they cannot control.  The Cape Town City Council is currently searching for a solution to face both these issues. Dealing with IPPs – Independent Power Producers – the city expects to buy electricity from another source than Eskom. Plus IPPs mostly produce clean and eco-friendly electricity coming from renewable energies such as solar panels, or windfarms, so it is even an answer to environmental issues.

IPPs solar panels

 

Cape Town already buys some electricity to rooftop sellers (solar energy), but it still represents a very small part of the city’s electricity supply, the major one remaining Eskom. The situation is slowly changing for the better.

Councillor Matthew Kempthorne, the chairperson of the Energy and Climate Change Portfolio Committee for the City of Cape Town indicated the City’s existing programs in place to face this crisis:“The City has two programs, the solar water accreditation program and our small scale embedded generation policy (SSEG). The first helps to facilitate residents on installing solar water heaters, [while] the SSEG policy allows residents and business to feed excess power [from their personal generation] back into the city’s electrical grid. At the moment the metering solution (monitoring electricity feedback into the grid for SSEG) is expensive and safety concerns are an issue as the City needs to maintain the grid and it can be dangerous to work on the grid if power is flowing from households that are incorrectly or illegally connected”. So if you are a power producer and have extra power you do not use, make contact with the city to sell it, but never connect your system by yourself to the city Grid.

 

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