THE Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality announced numerous changes to load shedding schedules and groups during a press conference on Wednesday, February 26.
One of the major changes that came into effect on Monday, March 2, was that domestic groups increased from eight to 19, with additional suburbs added. Industrial groups increased from eight to 11.
NMBM executive director of energy and electricity, Luvuyo Magalela, said that the schedules were initially calculated over an eight-day cycle.
However, the new schedule is calculated over a period of 19 days, which leads to a decrease in the number of times a group is shed.
“This means that domestic groups will not be shed for longer than two hours at a time.
“Industrial groups will just be shed for four hours at a time,” he said.
Magalela also added that the industrial groups were currently not shedding and would only do so if Eskom announced stages five to eight, which are the emergency stages.
The NMBM’s senior director of technical services, Bernhardt Lamour, said during a slideshow presentation that hospitals formed part of the “critical load” and would now also shed during stages one to four.
When asked if all hospitals were included, Lamour said only the hospitals without life support machines would shed, if they have the correct protocols in place.
He added that a meeting would be held with the relevant stakeholders to determine whether these hospitals had generators so that they were prepared for load shedding.
“We will be sorting out protocols tomorrow (Thursday, February 27).
“We’ll be informing them, getting names and contact details and finding out who has generators and how many they have,” Lamour added.
Acting manager of system operations, Bernard Tlali, emphasised that the NMBM had been doing its best to exclude hospitals from load shedding, but that they can be shed if necessary.
Magalela later said that it was important to note that the municipality would have preferred to not have load shedding at all.
“When our consumers are switched off for lengthy periods, it costs us much-needed revenue, money that could have gone towards providing better services to our constituencies.
“However, it is part of our reality and we have to deal with this inconvenient but necessary occurrence to ensure that the reliability of the national power grid is not compromised,” he explained.
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Click here for the new domestic groups OR click here for the new industrial groups.
