According to City Power, a technical fault resulted in several suburbs being plunged into darkness for hours. In a series of tweets, the utility explained that at 6:30 this morning it had experienced a technical fault on one of the transformers at a substation.
“Most suburbs in the North & South of Jhb are off due to a technical fault @ Prospect Substation. Our technicians are working on the problem,” the municipal power utility tweeted.
The Prospect Substation was one of three bulk intake stations in Johannesburg.
The power utility maintained that the current outages were not the result of load shedding and that it would not be implementing power cuts as a result of the crisis at Eskom’s Majuba power station in Mpumalanga. Eskom was forced to implement power cuts after a coal storage silo collapses at its Majuba site on 1 November.
As a result, City Power was asked to cut back on 460MW.
However, Eskom said it would not implement load shedding on 3 November, and did not anticipate that there would be any load shedding today as additional units had been restored following maintenance.
“The risk of load shedding has reduced significantly and the prognosis for the week is better than expected,” Eskom said in a statement.
“The system will be under extreme pressure on Wednesday [5 November] and Thursday [6 November] as the water reserves that we built up over the weekend for our peaking plants will be depleted.”
According to Eskom, if customers experienced power outages during this period, they were advised to contact municipal electricity providers as it could be a localised problem.
City Power was providing updates regarding the progress of work to restore power to affected areas on Twitter and can be followed @CityPower.
