The Challenge 

Load Shedding has been a large factor of South African’s lives, with an increasing frequency of occurrence in the last few months.
The source of the schedules of load shedding can be found on various websites, documents and apps… But none offer a dynamic and live mapping application to view which areas are being load shed in real time.

The Solution

Introducing the world of GIS, and its ability to make any data more powerful with the intelligence of spatial knowledge!
This City of Cape Town supplied power areas application was built using ArcGIS Dashboards, with added advanced Arcade queries to enhance functionality and usability for end-users.
A python script was used in order to sync the data with the Eskom load shedding status, making this application 98% out-the-box.

The Benefits

Users have the option to select their area in the side panel, and view their schedules for today, tomorrow and the day after. The major benefit of using GIS in this application, is providing the option to the user to search for their address, to identify which area they fall into.
The application highlights which areas are going into load shedding, areas currently without power, and areas going out of load shedding – all visible on the map!
Additional access links have been added to the application, including Eskom’s twitter page and the City of Cape Town’s circulated PDF for schedules.

Written by Amy Wootton 3 March 2020