CT manages to minimise load shedding

The City of Cape Town has managed to downgrade load shedding – a move that has been widely welcomed by business and residents alike.

Western Cape Premier Helen Zille told members of the Exporters Club Western Cape (ECWC) recently that Capetonians would have to deal with less load shedding thanks to the City being able to generate extra power.

“Effectively this means that when the rest of the country experiences stage 1 load shedding Cape Town avoids load shedding completely and when stage 2 load shedding is implemented then Cape Town only has stage 1.”

Zille said the downgrading of load shedding was due to the extra power being generated by the Steenbras Dam pumped storage scheme.
Steenbras, first commissioned in 1979, is owned by the City of Cape Town and has four generating units than can act as either a pump motor or a turbine generator.

The City has been working hard to create surplus national generating capacity. It uses relatively low-cost off-peak electricity available at night to pump water from the lower to the upper reservoir. The water is released back to the lower reservoir during the day when peak demand is high thus generating electricity as a hydroelectric power station would do.

But, said Zille, this did not mean that electricity should be taken for granted in the city.
“We are using the electricity crisis to really entrench the green economy in the Western Cape,” she said. “Our efforts are to ensure that it becomes a job generator and not a job cutter.”

Never one to waste a good crisis, she jokingly said, there were many opportunities at present to grow the green economy.
“We are encouraging our exporters to grab the opportunities that the electricity crisis has brought and to use them to restart the engine of our stalled economy.”