poweralert....

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JHB is so ****ed, I have a friend who works at city power who I had lunch with this afternoon, and he has told me that they now have only 1 block that comes back reliably after the 4-hour slots. There are now so many issues with their grid; I'm surprised it hasn't collapsed. Transformers are tripping due to overheating protection warnings from the oil cooling systems, so techs have to go out to bypass to restore power manually as the SCADA system gets locked out. The voltage is largely unstable across the entire city that is causing trips in distribution points, cable theft is completely out of control in some areas, and their contractors are now even sabotaging infrastructure, so they are firing them all and going back to employing full-time techs, bad solar installs are causing meters to trip their tamper detections and locking them, as well instances of systems feeding back into the grid causing localised frequency instabilities causing mini-substations to go haywire. The list just goes on and on.
 
I generally have a lot of sympathy for City Power (Jhb). They are working under terrible conditions to try and stop the power system in the city collapsing completely.

But this statement just now from their CEO may be of interest

"While we try our best to increase capacity in different areas of our operations to offset what would have been a disastrous impact on our customers, we want to plead with the residents to play their part.

This includes those with energy storage facilities like batteries and UPS systems (who should wait) to enable the load to settle first before plugging them back on after loadshedding"

I would if I knew WHEN it would end..
 
impracticaldogg said:
I generally have a lot of sympathy for City Power (Jhb). They are working under terrible conditions to try and stop the power system in the city collapsing completely.

But this statement just now from their CEO may be of interest...

"While we try our best to increase capacity in different areas of our operations to offset what would have been a disastrous impact on our customers, we want to plead with the residents to play their part.

This includes those with energy storage facilities like batteries and UPS systems (who should wait) to enable the load to settle first before plugging them back on after loadshedding"
Click to expand...
Kouga made more or less the same statement

https://www.facebook.com/KougaNews/posts/612608534242191

We humbly request that consumers be considerate of the greater community and to use the absolute minimum electricity during this period.

Switch off all geysers and inverter batteries - especially as they are not essential. When power comes back on, these two units take a lot of load which can be picked up after about an hour.
Click to expand...
 
impracticaldogg said:
I understand the technical issue - but I'm not prepared to sit in the dark waiting for the power to come back on when I've gone to the trouble of installing battery backup. I don't mind if they stagger switching blocks back on
Click to expand...
I don't see this working in the long run. Most people with an el cheapo UPS run lead acid batteries, which takes forever to fully charge.

I feel for the guys with those 200 ah agm/gel batteries on their trolleys, and even then the municipality expects you to wait an extra hour :cautious:

Edit: Here in JBay, if you're not switched on immediately after the loadshedding slot, you can forget it, you're going to wait an extra hour before the power comes back on, making it effectively 5 hour slots. At least, this is rotated between areas.
 
impracticaldogg said:
I understand the technical issue - but I'm not prepared to sit in the dark waiting for the power to come back on when I've gone to the trouble of installing battery backup. I don't mind if they stagger switching blocks back on
Click to expand...
Technically that's what the 30 minutes is supposed to be for.
But yeah not always easy to prevent your system kicking back in to charge.
 
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