While many South Africans plan their day around load-shedding, those living in Newcastle West are unaffected by power cuts.

The Sunday Times reported that the town of 55,000 people is not affected by load-shedding thanks to “load management” by its municipality.

The Newcastle municipality is the distributor of electricity for the town and stopped power cuts by reducing its electricity usage during periods of load-shedding.

Municipal officials have installed geyser switches in residents’ homes which turn the geysers off during peak times. This reduces power demand and means load-shedding does not have to be implemented.

The report stated that Newcastle residents have praised the move and love the fact that they are not affected by power cuts.

Big problems

While Newcastle enjoys its access to power, energy expect Chris Yelland warned that Eskom is facing an array of problems.

The problems include South Africa running out of diesel, which is needed to run backup diesel-fueled power stations.

Eskom is also missing 5,000MW of power from eight generator units, which are down due to boiler tube leaks.

Additionally, three generator units with boiler tube leaks are running – which place them at risk.

The issues of boiler leaks has been credited with plunging South Africa into stage 4 load-shedding this past week, after it was reported that a company hijacked boiler monitoring software developed, paid for, and piloted by Eskom

According to the report, a number of former Eskom employees cashed in on a R275-million boiler monitoring tender related to the software.