DURBAN - ESKOM announced yesterday that it would move to stage 4 load shedding.
Eskom said stage 4 load shedding would continue until 5am tomorrow to manage the emergency reserves.
Eskom chief operating officer Jan Oberholzer said it was “critically important” to balance emergency resources to avoid a worse situation – such as implementing stage 6 power cuts.
The Pietermaritzburg and Midlands Chamber of Commerce said that it was inconceivable that business should have to endure load shedding now, just as the economy was starting to ramp up again.
Melanie Veness, chief executive of the chamber, said the latest round of load shedding was devastating and all businesses would be negatively impacted.
“Most small businesses don’t have generators, so they can’t function at all during load shedding.
“Industry, which employs large numbers of people, is severely impacted – you can’t ramp factories up and down every few hours. Some of them take eight hours to ramp up, so they may as well just close when there’s load shedding.”
Veness said that an additional aggravating factor was that if a city’s infrastructure had not been adequately maintained, like in the case of Pietermaritzburg, then load shedding triggered faults, which led to extended outages.
“Honestly, we’re trying to win a huge battle with our hands tied behind our backs.
“It’s unreasonable. Far more established economies are struggling to reboot post-Covid. How on earth can we expect to do that post-Covid and the July riots, with a disrupted power supply?”
Jayaraj Naidoo, owner of Happy Chappy restaurant, said that his business had been affected by load shedding.
“During load shedding the point of sale (system) is down.
“There was a delay with the baking of bread today because of load shedding, so we only received bread at about midday.
“Also, when there is no power, a kitchen can’t operate fully.”
Naidoo said that it also impacted on customers.
“The customer can’t pay for food using their cards and not all customers carry cash.
“We also can’t provide a full menu for customers during load shedding. We have to use a gas stove, and due to the extreme heat a gas stove is not always conducive for cooking all types of food, which affects our business. We hope that the crisis at Eskom will be resolved.”
Joel Mundie, director of Joe Lab Media, a media company based in Durban, said that in his business, time and efficiency were of the utmost importance.
“I clearly remember a few weeks ago, we had a client that we were shooting, from 6pm until late. At 6pm there was load shedding.
“Luckily, my lighting came in handy and I was able to struggle, yet complete a Photobooth set-up for my client which I usually do at the end of the function, this in turn gave us a delay in the event.”
Mundie added that the editing process was also hampered by the power cuts.
“Most creative professionals such as my colleagues and I use desktop computers rather than laptops for our post-work editing process.
“These machines don’t run on batteries, therefore we have to rely on the grid to keep our work going.
“This means that our workflow becomes compromised as we are consistently coming in and out of a routine of editing.”