Cape Town - Eskom maintains that exempting certain sectors from load shedding is not a feasible option and could lead to a national blackout.
This, as the legal battle to see load shedding come to an end continued in the North Gauteng High Court on Wednesday, where a broad coalition of South Africans aim to hold government accountable to its citizens for Eskom’s failure to provide stable electricity.
Monday marked the first day of proceedings where arguments for the coalition including Build One South Africa (BOSA), UDM, ActionSA and others were heard.
Their argument centres around load shedding being a gross violation of human rights and as violating the Constitution, impacting primarily on the poor and marginalised.
They are seeking limited relief to exempt certain sectors, such as schools, healthcare facilities and police stations from load-shedding. They argue that the relief sought “is not impossible” citing reported engagement between Eskom and health authorities at provincial level on the exemption of key hospitals.
“The applicants (coalition) assert that such exemption should apply to all hospitals, not just key hospitals. The process will entail the involvement of planning departments who must assess where the infrastructure in question is located relative to the sub-station or station that will supply it with electricity. If the hospital is deeply embedded, the network planning has to make a recommendation for a dedicated electricity supply cable from the hospital to the nearest substation,” court papers for the coalition read.
However, in court papers, Eskom says it cannot exempt institutions from load shedding without catastrophic repercussions.
“The sheer number of the institutions, facilities and infrastructure that would have to be excluded from load shedding and assured an uninterrupted supply of electricity, would, without a doubt, pose a serious and unacceptable risk of a national blackout.
“The overwhelming majority of customers are not supplied by means of direct feeders (distribution lines) connected to the supply station or substation with switches (circuit-breakers) to enable their supply to be independently controlled.
Customers are, instead, ‘embedded’ in the distribution network in the sense that they share feeders with hundreds or thousands of other customers without independent switching capability,” court papers read.
“It is impossible to implement load shedding in any targeted and rotational fashion, let alone the highly specific manner in which the applicants propose.
The electricity supply to individual users or facilities cannot be isolated and separately controlled.”
The electricity supply to individual users or facilities cannot be isolated and separately controlled.”
Eskom maintains its plans to recover and bolster its generation capacity require the balancing of its immediate, medium and long-term needs making reference to its 10-year Transmission Development Plan.
Cape Times