City Power explains why the lights are off so often

Joburg’s City Power is losing billions annually due to aging infrastructure, electricity theft and billing failures as the utility admits challenges facing the city’s electricity supply.

Over the past year, technical losses amounted to R1.5 billion while nontechnical losses exceeded R2 billion.

At a media breakfast session at its Fordsburg depot, City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava acknowledged the utility’s financial strain and outlined measures to secure funding, improve revenue collection and modernise the power grid.

Challenges and solutions

She said one of their biggest challenges was outdated infrastructure and the lack of advanced technology for remote monitoring and operations.

“To address this, we have invested heavily in our secondary plant, increasing visibility from 40% to 100%,” she said.

“With better visibility, we can remotely manage operations more efficiently. However, with old infrastructure, residual faults occur. When we switch power back on at substations, faults can still happen down the line.”

The utility has, like Eskom before it, blamed bad weather for several outages and lengthy delays.

It has also urged customers to pay their bills, as the revenue was critical for technology upgrades.

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Investing in a future with the lights on

“We want customers to trust that we are investing in technology that will protect them from load shedding,” she said.

As a medium- to long-term measure, City Power is working on load-limiting technology to reduce the impact of blackouts.

“Our research and development teams are working on this, but we need buy-in from various customer groups for successful implementation,” Mashava said.

‘Struggling with finances’

She conceded that City Power was unhappy with its financial position.

“While we are achieving 75% of our performance indicators, there is still 25% that we are struggling with and a part of that is finances.

“We lose electricity due to old infrastructure that overheats, suboptimal network designs and outages caused by equipment failures. Some of our transformers are over 90 years old, whereas a healthy transformer should last around 35 years with proper maintenance.”

Aging infrastructure

Mashava said between 2005 and 2010, City Power focused on expansion rather than replacing outdated systems.

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“Now, in 2025, the consequences of those past decisions have caught up with us. If we don’t change our infrastructure, these losses will continue to grow. The auditor-general has flagged this issue, as we had the responsibility to address it years ago.”

To improve service delivery, City Power has secured alternative funding with the support of its shareholder.

“The City of Joburg’s finance team and group governance helped us obtain international investment. We may receive funding as early as September. Investors conducted due diligence, including inspections of our infrastructure and micro-grid projects and, fortunately, our existing green energy initiatives met their requirements.”

Billing failures

City Power is also tackling nontechnical losses, including billing failures.

Currently, technical losses stand at approximately 9%, while nontechnical losses – such as inaccurate billing – are around 20%.

Mashava said some industrial and commercial customers were not being billed at all.

“A major clean-up effort is underway to ensure all customers are accounted for. To improve billing accuracy, City Power has been granted authority to handle billing directly, rather than relying on the city,” she said.

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Starting on 1 April, City Power will take full responsibility for billing.

“This should reduce instances of customers receiving estimated bills instead of accurate readings. If we implement changes effectively, we should see significant improvements in financial and operational stability.”