City Power battling to keep the lights on after high outage calls

City Power has warned that it is experiencing a high-volume of calls, with over 1 549 outage calls recorded in the past day and that load shedding is adding to its woes.

The regional power utility said that eight of those calls are due to medium voltage (MV) outages, with the rest being individual low voltage (LV) calls across the City of Johannesburg.

Outages

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said teams in all service delivery centers (SDC) have been dispatched to investigate these outages, while other teams are on the ground attending to outage calls.

“We will be beefing up teams into areas throughout the day to ensure the repairs are speedily done and power is restored.

Mangena said City Power is also unable to deal with the high backlog of outage calls in the past 24 hours, as it’s running out of stock material, such including cables, mini substations (MSS), Bulk Metering Kiosk, breakers and joints.

“Our SDCs are battling to deal with high demands of repairs due to cable theft and vandalism, as well as multiple cable faults.”

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Load shedding

Mangena has warned that the deliberate power cuts by Eskom are also impacting the high volume of outages.

“Load shedding is further having a negative impact on our infrastructure, which by its nature was never meant to be switched on and off at short regular intervals. For that reason, many of our mini substations (MSS), pole-mounted transformers, and transformers often catch fire or fail post load shedding due to different reasons including overloading and inrush current.”

Mangena said the higher stages of load shedding are forcing City Power to replace more stock material faster than it can be replenished.

“We are also encountering frequent faults since most of our cables are old, and would have been cut and repaired by joining them with new replacement cables due to the theft that is happening. As a result, whenever there is load shedding and power returns, the surge in this power will affect the weaker points on the cable which is often where we have joined them and would then pop.”

Pressure areas

Mangena said the areas with the most outages include Reuven with 308 outage calls, Lenasia with 310, Roodepoort with 258 outage calls and Hursthill with 237 outage calls.

“In addition, the Roodepoort SDC – the Peter Road Substation has 15 mini substations that are off as well as the Helderkruin Switching Station with 17 load centres also remain off due to the lack of material. In Alexandra, four cables were stolen at the same time, plunging a larger part of three areas into darkness. Teams are currently sourcing materials to mitigate this.

“We are engaging our suppliers to receive more stock material in order to effect repairs. Most of which will arrive sometime later today, and going into the coming days,” Mangena said

Cable theft

Mangena said City Power has also been getting increased complaints regarding the theft incidents of service cables.

“There seems to be a syndicate stealing these cables from households, particularly in the Lenasia and Alexandra SDCs, disguising themselves as City Power employees. We would like to alert residents that City Power has not embarked on any project to replace these cables,” he said.

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