Energy analyst Chris Yelland has described as a “sound call” the decision by Eskom to implement load reduction amid the onset of winter, and extensive damage to infrastructure from illegal connections and electricity theft.
Commenting on the call by Eskom to reduce loads at peak hours particularly in densely-populated areas where electricity theft was rife, Yelland yesterday said the utility had to act on balancing the load in specific areas where it identified excessive demand than was catered for in a bid to limit damage to its equipment, including transformers.
“Instead of just leaving it in which case they will have equipment failure, they switch off these areas during times of overloading usually during the morning peak and evening peak in the winter months when the highest level of demand occurs,” Yelland told Business Report.
He said load reduction was also applied by municipalities on their customers who were usually “poorish” residential customers where there were high-levels of electricity theft, by-passing of meters and illegal connections, which caused overloading of the distribution network, transformers, and cable lines.
“From a customer perspective, the two feel exactly the same. Power is cut at certain hours of the day, but essentially they are not the same because manual rotational load shedding is Eskom responding to a mismatch between supply and demand,” Yelland explained.
“So when demand is higher than supply and they cannot increase the supply, they have to bring supply and demand back into balance and they do that by switching off customers and rotating them, so it does not inconvenience the same people all the time.”
Yelland also said while Eskom would not cap or switch off municipalities over drawing on the maximum notified demand (MND), they were not switched off but had to pay severe financial penalties for exceeding their allocation.
“The point is Eskom just can’t cut supply even if the municipality is exceeding its MND because that would cause a lot of hardship for essential services like hospitals, clinics, schools, and other essential services. They penalise the municipality financially,” he said.
Eskom, which has avoided implementing load shedding for 104 consecutive days due to sufficient generation capacity, said the issue of network overloading had resurfaced with the onset of winter.
The power utility began load reduction to protect its transformers countrywide as illegal connections overloaded the system.
Eskom Group executive for distribution Monde Bala on Monday said there were around 2 111 transformers which were frequently overloaded across the country at risk of being damaged, with around 900 transformers awaiting replacement.
Bala said the issue is prevalent in Limpopo, Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, and North West where about 94% of the total overloaded transformers were as a result of electricity theft and indiscriminate use of electricity.
“While Eskom aims to exclude paying customers from load reduction, the network’s configuration does not allow for dedicated supply lines to paying customers, making it impractical to service them separately,” Bala said.
BUSINESS REPORT