It’s thanks to hydropower that Cape Town suburbs are often spared the inconvenience of loadshedding – for example, if Eskom has announced Stage 2 loadshedding, municipality-supplied electricity consumers may only be subject to Stage 1. This is because Cape Town’s municipality owns its own hydroelectric facility, the 180 MW Steenbras Hydro Pump Station. As its name suggests, it’s a pumped storage scheme, the very first in Africa when commissioned
in 1979.
