IN A collaborated effort between the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality and business owners, traffic lights at 18 intersections in the city will continue to operate during loadshedding, mitigating the impact on the city’s economy.
The detrimental impact of loadshedding on the country, and the metro, has brought many businesses to a grinding halt with one in five businesses reporting that they have cut jobs and over 90 percent halting investment and expansion plans.
In a bid to keep not only the traffic lights working, but to minimise the impact on the business sector and investments in Nelson Mandela Bay, 12 businesses have approached the municipality to “sponsor” a traffic light to bring stability to the city’s economy.
“As the saying goes, when times are tough, the tough get going and that’s exactly what these business owners did. We know that loadshedding will be with us for the foreseeable future and we need to find innovative ways of collaborating with the private sector to find solutions,” said executive mayor, Retief Odendaal.
These robot controllers are made of a unit which allows for a reliable supply of energy to traffic lights, enabling them to remain running even during power outages.
When the grid power returns with a fluctuating voltage, the controller will delay and monitor the voltage for one minute to ensure a stable power input and avoid load damage.
“Loadshedding unfortunately leads to job shedding and it is simply not something that we can afford. We need to be creating an economic climate that attracts investment and sees the unemployment rate decrease” he added.
This is a pilot project and, if it proves successful, the metro will roll out the UPS systems to more intersections.
The location of the UPS systems will remain confidential to prevent vandalism and theft of the units.
However, security measures will be put in place to ensure the protection of the units.
Energy efficient LED lighting is being installed across the metro with 2 100 LED street lights installed. The LED lights use less electricity in terms of kilowatt-hours to operate, and since installation, the metro has saved more than R2 million in electricity consumption.
“We have established a Sustainable Energy Sub-Directorate which was created to focus solely on renewable energy and related issues, and aligning our energy plan with current industry trends. We are also looking at load curtailment, load reduction and other creative solutions,” said MMC for Electricity and Energy, Lance Grootboom.
“In the medium term, the aim is to refurbish the gas turbine (a ModPod 50) at Mount Road, with an installed capacity of 50mW that will operate at around 40mW (which is equivalent to two stages of loadshedding).
The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality, together with the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber, are exploring diverse solutions to mitigate the impact of loadshedding.
“I encourage innovative thinking from the business sector and welcome partnerships.
“Nelson Mandela Bay has so much potential that we still have to realise and we can only achieve that through efforts of collaboration,” Odendaal said.
– ISSUED BY
THE EXECUTIVE MAYOR
