Cape Town - The sudden jump between different power cut stages is making it difficult for businesses to plan ahead, undermining productivity, the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry said on Wednesday.
“We have had two days where stage one blackouts suddenly became stage two blackouts,” the chamber's president Janine Myburgh said in a statement.
“We have also had cases where scheduled load shedding was not applied.”
It would be better if outages were more predictable so commerce and industry could work around them.
“In a simple office situation you might know that your computers are going to be down for a two-hour period in the morning so you could schedule your staff and other meetings for this down-time,” she said.
On Wednesday, Eskom implemented stage one power cuts, which ended at 2pm instead of the planned 10pm, due to lower power consumption.
Stage one allows for up to 1000MW of the national load to be cut, stage two for up to 2000MW, and stage three for up to 4000MW.
Eskom said the system would continue to be under severe pressure for the rest of the week and that the risk of rolling blackouts would remain medium to high.
Sapa