The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality (NMBM) has committed to expedite the finalisation of the assessment and procurement of the Metro’s gas turbine to relieve its customers from the negative impact of the ongoing electricity crisis in the country.
These exciting developments were shared in a meeting held between the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality and Volkswagen SA on 17 January 2024.
The NMBM Electricity and Energy Mayoral Committee Member, Cllr Zanele Sikawuti said the directorate is at the final stages of appointing the original manufacturer of the turbine to conduct in-depth assessment and produce the assessment report with refurbishment costs of the plant, which is currently non-operational.
“Through our supply chain management processes, we are now in the final stages of appointing the manufacturer to get it back on track,” said MMC Sikawuti.
“We shared the news with VWSA as a short to medium term mitigation strategy as we understand the industry is negatively impacted by loadshedding. The NMBM gas turbine has an installed capacity of 50Megawatts and operates at approximately 40Megawatts.This intervention will relieve the Metro of about two stages of load shedding.
We understand the frustrations of the industry and we are all doing our best to meet them halfway as these businesses employ thousands of our people and contribute to our GDP. We are doing all these means in an effort to save jobs,” MMC Sikawuti said.
NMBM already exempts all industrial customers within the Metro from Stages 1 to 4. The customized loadshedding schedules that allow the local economy to continue have been designed in collaboration with the industries within the Metro.
During December 2022, the implementation of voluntary 24 hours loadshedding to qualifying customers was executed and customers that qualify to a set criterion are shed for 24 hours in an 8-day cycle including VWSA.
“There are various strategies we have put in place, and we will continue to do our best to support the industry as we also have long term strategies in place. The NMBM has also deployed a system of ripple control geyser switches; the deployment is over 84 000 geyser control switches in the Metro, which have a capacity to control a load up to 50 MVA. This technology is currently being used to reduce loadshedding should the loadshedding schedules remain in sync with the geyser control schedules,” the MMC added.
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