Shortly before load-shedding is due to start, City Power electrician Patrick Hlungwani leaves his usual daily duties attending to power outages and faults in Johannesburg to drive to a substation as instructed by the control room.
Hlungwani and his partner Siboniso Khumalo divert their attention to a new task: ensuring the correct suburbs are plunged into darkness according to the load-shedding schedule. This must be done by manually switching off substations that cannot be switched off remotely.
Last Thursday TimesLIVE accompanied them to a substation in Mondeor that needed switching off. Shortly after 5pm they had turned off Mondeor, South Gate and surrounding areas. “You need somebody because you are busy attending to the fault. There is load-shedding that must be done so you phone somebody. Remember the person you are calling is not on shift, he is off, maybe he is not even in Gauteng,” he said.Inside the control room at the affected substations the electricians have to switch off transformers and then return when it is time to restore electricity in that area.
He said load-shedding had a detrimental effect on the city’s electrical grid. The infrastructure that is not only aged but carries a R26bn backlog.
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