How?

Simply add or save our whatsApp number 0443822484 to your smart phone and refresh your WhatsApp contact list, and you should be able to now send us a message directly to that number!

You can now send us a message or you can send us screen shots of the issue you are experiencing on Android, iOs, Windows mobile and Web as displayed by the images below. So go ahead and test it out! 

Our other support channels include:

Email: support@powertime.co.za

Office line: (021) 911 5611

Messenger: m.me/PowertimeZA

And of course, our live chat feature on our website!

The post WhatsApp now Support: Get in touch with us! appeared first on Powertime.

What is free basic electricity?

“FBE is the amount of electricity, which is deemed sufficient to provide basic electricity services to a poor household. This amount of energy will be sufficient to provide basic lighting, basic media access, basic water heating using a kettle and basic ironing in terms of grid electricity and basic lighting and basic media access for non-grid systems.”

Who is supposed to get the free basic electricity per month?

“The focus of free basic services is intended for poor households, but basically anyone who qualifies for the lifeline tariff plan as stipulated by their municipality.”

What amount of electricity will be considered as free basic electricity?

“The proposed levels of service are 50kWh per household per month for a grid-based system for qualifying domestic consumers, and 50Wp per non-grid connected supply system for all households connected to the official non-grid systems.”

How much is 50kWh and what can be done with this amount of electricity?

“The 50kWh is equivalent to energy necessary for basic lighting, small black and white TV, small radio, basic ironing and basic water boiling through an electric kettle for grid-connected consumers.”

How would one know when the 50kWh has been exceeded?

“For pre-paid meters a household will be provided with a non-interchangeable voucher or token loaded with free basic units per month. When the free units have been used up, the consumer will need to buy additional units at the prevailing approved rates. For credit-metered customers, the total units consumed will be reduced by the amount of free basic units. For credit-meter customers, it is not easy to see when the free units are exceeded.”

What will happen if I do not collect the voucher and who is responsible for issuing it?

“The voucher will be valid for one month only, and units will not accumulate to the next month (claim it or loose it). The same applies for credit-metered consumers (use it or loose it). Remember that network charges will be imposed to all consumption exceeding 50kWh per month. Who is responsible for the provision of the free basic electricity? National government will provide policy and guidelines in respect of free basic electricity. Local government will be responsible for implementation of the FBE with the aid of guidelines from national government.”

What happens in areas where Eskom is the provider rather than municipalities?

“Local government is responsible for the provision of basic services in its area of jurisdiction. Eskom is providing a service on behalf of municipalities. Even in a case like this, municipalities will still be responsible for funding the provision of free basic services. Where government grants are paid to municipalities, these must be paid to Eskom to cover the cost of providing free basic electricity to the targeted households.”

The post FAQ’s on Free Basic Electricity appeared first on Powertime.

Solar Photovoltaic (PV) is a technology that converts sunlight (Solar radiation) into direct current electricity by using semiconductors. When the sun hits the semiconductor within the PV cell, electrons are freed and form an electric current.

Several of these could be completed in nine months, including the 2000MW currently under development at Sibanye stillwater who is the leading international precious metals mining company, with a diverse portfolio of platinum group metal and gold operations and projects.

A presentation by the minerals councils at this year’s Mining Indaba showed that at least seven mining companies are either busy developing or considering potential projects.

1. Vendata: Headquartered in Johannesburg South Africa – is a grouping of Zinc assets located in South Africa, Namibia and Ireland, owned by India Vendata Limited. Vendata plans to add 2000MW of self-generating capacity to its operations in the Northern Cape within the next three years.
2. The Goldfields South Deep Mine: Is located in the Mpumalanga region of South Africa and one of the world’s biggest gold mines. It is also the seventh deepest mine in the world with a depth of 2,995m below the surface. the mining company plans to add 40MW of solar power, supplemented by another 23MW of diesel generation within the next year.
3. Anglo American is another industry heavyweight which plans to add a solar generating plant at one of its mines.

The post Mining companies plan on Electricity appeared first on Powertime.

Please take note of the support hours during the festival period:

• 25th December 2019: We are closed on Christmas Day/ all your queries will be resolved on the following day.
• 26th December 2019 and 01st January 2020, We open from 7AM till 1PM
• The rest of the days, we will be normal support hours (7AM till 7PM)

Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to being of service to you again in the coming year.

The post Support hours during the Christmas period appeared first on Powertime.

This comes after heavy pressure from National Treasury, who imposed municipal debt recovery as a mandatory condition to it’s R59bn life-line, thus the disconnection warnings. This “bail-out”, was signed off by President Cyril Ramaphosa to assist Eskom repay it’s interest. The group debt burden amounts to some R450bn

The municipalities recently threatened with disconnection by Eskom, are Bloemfontein, Mafuba and Mantsopa. This comes after repeated failure to adhere to or honor payment agreements. These were agreed to by the municipalities and Eskom itself. So, what exactly are Eskom threatening to do if these municipalities do not pay up?

Eskom said that they would implement the following disconnection actions; Disconnecting the electricity supply to these municipalities between the times 06:00 and 20:00 during weekdays. As well as disconnections on the weekends following the 3rd December. However, they would be allowing power to be supplied over-night. An amount of 8 hours would be allowed for this to take place.

In other news, disconnections would also be facing the city of Soweto and some parts of the greater Gauteng area. This comes after investigations into meter tampering, as well as non-payment of electricity bills. Eskom says that out of the 180 000 electricity meters in Soweto, 120 000 were found to be tampered with. While in other regions of Gauteng, 490 000 out of the 760 000 energy meters, were found to have been tampered with.

The post Eskom’s Municipal Disconnection Operation appeared first on Powertime.

So if you’re not already aware of this new energy plan, let’s unpack it a little bit. The policy includes some surprising interventions. Some of these notable interventions include the following:

Coal Dependence

Currently, in terms of the total energy generation in South Africa, coal accounts for 77% of that across all it’s coal plants. According to the IRP, the projection is that by the year 2030, this percentage would have been reduced to somewhere in the region of 60% of all energy production in the country. So still heavily dependent on coal fired plants which environmentalist are especially not pleased about.

Renewable Energy?

Despite coal still playing a significant role in energy generation, there is space for a shift towards renewables. According to the IRP, government expects to hike the contribution made to the grid by wind generated energy infrastructures. In the initial draft version of the IRP, released last year, wind generated energy was only supposed to deliver 13% of SA’s electricity by 2030– this has now been increased to more than 18%.

By 2030, solar will supply 7% of electricity. Hydro plants will contribute 8%, nuclear 4.5% and the rest from gas and diesel.

New Coal Plants

The newly released IRP indicates that government notes a business case for the construction of modular and smaller power plants producing between 300mw and 600mw. Particularly in the face of some of the current fleet of power plants being decommissioned in the coming years. Nuclear is very expensive at commissioning and at decommissioning, but when it is operational it is “most reliable and cost effective,” Mantashe told journalists on Friday.

Nuclear reactors planned?

Montalto said that new nuclear capacity does not come onstream before 2030, but discussion of work to start on scoping new nuclear is in the plan for coming on grid beyond 2030.

The IRP argued that smaller nuclear plants will be easier managed investments when compared to large-scale projects. But government acknowledges that these could take more than 10 years to construct, and no additional nuclear power is set to come online before 2030.

The post Unpacking IRP2019 appeared first on Powertime.

They had extremely hard words for the ailing state-owned entity which was shared in a statement issued by COSATU, Wednesday evening. They slated the power utility for “haemorrhaging” money. This, in part, relates to the besieged power utility having incurred debt in excess of R400bn and suffering a net loss of R21bn in the 2018/2019 financial year.

Last week Eskom chair and acting CEO Jabu Mabuza painted a gloomy picture of Eskom’s finances, saying management was hard at work to revive as much of the entity as possible. Cosatu has called the standard of leadership at Eskom “mediocre”,  and further noted that load shedding is said to have contributed to the contraction of the economy by 3.2% in the first quarter of the year. That is devastating. And it’s no surprise that the rand fell sharply to the dollar, as soon as it was announced that Eskom will be implementing load-shedding. In their statement released to the media on Wednesday night, COSATU further stated:

“The announced load shedding flies in the face of the commitment made by the Minister of Public Enterprises to the Presidential Working Committee meeting at Nedlac (National Economic Development and Labour Council) a mere week ago that Eskom is on top of the situation,”

COSATU called for a pubilc forensic audit of all expenses of Eskom, including all coal supplier contracts.  There was further criticism for the appointment of board chair Jabu Mabuza as acting CEO, calling the appointment “illegitimate”, and saying the decision had “contributed to the erosion of trust in the power utility”. Meanwhile, President Cyril Ramaphosa has announced that soon, government will announce a new deal to assist Eskom deal with it’s debt crisis. This announcement will be made soon and would appease ratings agencies.

The post Cosatu wants action to be taken appeared first on Powertime.

This is the case at the time of writing but there still remains the strong possibility that the stage level will be upgraded to stage two, and this could even be a possibility today and definitely going into the weekend. This despite Eskom CEO, Jabu Mabuza saying that load-shedding should cease by this weekend. The current load-shedding implementation has been blamed on boiler leaks at 6 different power generating units, although some of these units are now online. Mabuza went further on to stress the fact that some the current power generation fleet has an average age of 36 years.

Another factor that contributed to the rolling black out, was the failure of the conveyor belt feeding coal from Exxaro’s Grootegeluk mine to the Medupi power station in Lephalale, Limpopo. The conveyor belt, which transports an average of 4000 tons of coal to the Medupi plant, per hour, reportedly broke down on Saturday. Mabuza mentioned in the presser, that a huge contingent of expertise has been dispatched to the area and he expects the machinery to be up and running by next week, Wednesday.  Whether load-shedding will stay away this weekend or not, remains to be seen then..

Currently, coal is being transported to the Medupi powerplant by means of bulldozers. Eskom, also has had to make use of open cycle gas turbines to cater for the current electricity shortfall. The issue with this, and it was an issue back in March as well, is that diesel stocks are incredibly expensive and current stocks are running low. This also contributes to the load-shedding situation. Mabuza said that Eskom is using much less diesel that it has in the past. In the past financial year, Eskom burnt diesel worth R6bn to keep the lights on in South Africa – in  the year to date, it only used R500m.

Please ensure that you check your schedule to see how you are affected and remember to protect your appliances from power surge by switching them off at the wall sockets before load-shedding commences.

The post Stage 1 load-shedding current , Stage 2 possibility appeared first on Powertime.

She does go on to explain why a positive economic outlook would have a negative impact on Eskom and it’s operations. It may seem like a very outlandish or absurd comment, but the explanation makes logical sense if you think it through. The main logical reason for this is that, the better the economy performs, the greater the demand becomes for energy.

This becomes an issue especially because energy availability in South Africa is about 11% below what it should be, currently sitting at 69%, a figure that should be sitting around 80%. This sentiment was echoed by Independent Energy thought leader CEO Mike Rossouw, who said the problems at Eskom can be attributed to completely wrong pricing policy.

Sharing his thoughts on this, he goes on to say that in the past, the current policy could be seen as suitable due to a smaller scale and less investment in new plants. However, presently Eskom can not generate the revenue needed to support investment into the new plants it is building, neither to support the scale of it’s operations.

He lamented that the focus on fixing Eskom was on addressing the symptoms, rather than the root cause of pricing policy.

The post Positive GDP, the catalyst for Eskom Load-shedding? appeared first on Powertime.

In a statement released by Eskom on Monday evening (06 August 2018) they have said that the risk of load-shedding is low for Tuesday, however the advised that this risk could be increased during evening peak periods, that is between 19:00 and 21:00.

These issues around load-shedding comes after tensions between the power utility and it’s employees resulted in wide spread industrial action, intimidation and various acts of sabotage put strain on the power grid’s generation capacity. This had the result of Eskom initiating load-shedding lasting 3 hours last week Tuesday and they have confirmed that the risk of load shedding will remain high for atleast 30 days, to give recovery teams a chance to repair damaged infrastructure.

Consumers (residential and business) have been advised to please check the load-shedding schedule on the website and treat this schedule as if it has been implemented. So, to avoid being caught in the dark, please check the link below for your load-shedding schedule and be sure to strategize around it.

http://loadshedding.eskom.co.za/

The post Load Shedding Update! appeared first on Powertime.