City Power infrastructure also old, battling with load shedding

City Power says it is working hard to address the increasing failure of the back up batteries at several of its major substations.

Parts of Johannesburg has been plagued by extended outages after load shedding due to strain on the local power utility’s infrastructure.

“We have recently encountered many prolonged outages post load shedding leading to an increase in outage calls from customers,” said City Power‘s Isaac Mangena.

“The impact of load shedding on our fleet of backup batteries is huge, coupled with the fact that some of them are old,” he added.

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Battery lifespan

The batteries have an eight hour lifespan during load shedding downtime, and are meant to play back-up during the blackouts and assists when technicians restore power remotely.

“Rampant load shedding, especially the higher stages we find ourselves in, is exposing our aged network especially the substation batteries,” explained Mangena.

“Most of our substations that do not come back after load shedding is due to the batteries which are unable to last for four hours load shedding bout to enable for remote switching, forcing us to send Operators around to manually do fault finding and switch on the network.”

City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava.

“City Power has a plan to ramp up the repairs of the battery system and the replacement of the old batteries to ensure we cut down on interruptions after load shedding.

“We are currently not having enough budget to address all the substations but we are moving funds around to address the most critical areas,” added Mashava.

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Roodepoort feels the pinch

The recent impact of the batteries problem was felt in Roodepoort last Thursday (12 January 2023) which saw City Power’s open customer calls spiking from 575 in the morning to 909 by late evening due to Nursery substation which did not come back after load shedding.

“On investigation we found that the reason for the substation to trip after load shedding was the increased wear-and-tear on the aged batteries at the substation.

“The substation is one of our first priorities in our battery replacement program but it will take a couple of weeks to resolve due to long lead times for the delivery of batteries,” said Mangena.

Nursery substation is feeding six other substations downstream which are William Nicol, Fieldhouse, Jan Smuts, Florida, Mechanical Workshop and Maraisburg, which explains why the impact was huge on customers leading to calls spiking to almost a 1000.

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The team worked the entire Thursday night until Friday morning and managed to restore five of the six substations by 4am, with Mechanical Workshop attended to on Friday morning.

“We will also prioritise William Nicol, Jan Smuts, Maraisburg, Mechanical Workshop, Reefhaven, Penny Street and Manufactaon substations on our battery replacement program.

“We once more request our communities to be patient while we are working hard through the challenges to ensure availability of supply to Roodepoort customers.”

The Roodepoort area is still recovering from the devastating effects of the December 2022 adverse weather, consistent high stages of load shedding and persistent high rate of theft and vandalism.

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