Africa-Press – South-Africa. Johannesburg’s City Power has excluded 10 of the city’s hospitals and clinics from load shedding.
The energy company said, based on its assessments of the city network, it could only exclude 10 of the more than 130 health facilities because of the way the network was configured.
Health facilities are under enormous pressure during load shedding.
“City Power was approached by the Department of Health to consider ways of exempting their facilities from load shedding because of the critical nature of the service they render to residents.
“While we are committed, as City Power, to ensure there’s minimal to no disruption to the essential services such as clinics and hospitals, it is difficult to exclude all of them from load shedding.”
Exempted facilities include:
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said most health facilities were embedded in the network with residents, and excluding those facilities would affect homes on the grid.
“Excluding those hospitals will mean most of the areas around the hospitals will not be load shed.
“We have a problem dealing with Rahima Moosa Hospital because it’s on the same feeder board as the entire community of Westdene and surroundings, at about 34 MVA (megavolt ampere).
“If we exclude them from load shedding, we would have to exclude everyone feeding from there, a huge area, and we may not be able to give Eskom the amount of power they need us to shed,” he said.
“We are working on the network to see how we can separate most of these facilities from the blocks we shed,” he added.
Mangena said City Power was also working with water utilities to find ways to exclude them from load shedding.
This follows recent problems with water pressure at pumps and reservoirs, most of which are in the vicinity of Rahima Moosa Hospital in the Hurst Hill area south of Johannesburg.
For More News And Analysis About South-Africa Follow Africa-Press
