Nancefield, Eldorado substations remain offline after massive power outage

The Nancefield and Eldorado substations are still offline following Wednesday’s massive power outage at the Orlando Switching Station, City Power said.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said supply was restored to the rest of the substations affected by the outage.

“Our team is still hard at work with operations aimed at restoring power to customers supplied from both the Eldorado Park and Nancefield substations.

Restored

The following substations and areas they supply have since been restored:

• Pennyville substation
• Mayfair substation
• Industria substation
• Eikenhof substation
• Soweto substation
• Nirvana substation
• Hursthill substation

“We want to assure our customers that we are committed to restoring supply as soon as we are able to. We apologise for the inconvenience the outage causes our customers. At this stage we are still not able to provide an estimated time of restoration. We will be communicating further as work on site progresses,” Mangena said.

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Smart pre-paid meters

Meanwhile, City Power is converting all non-vending smart pre-paid meters to post paid in all its areas of supply across the City of Johannesburg.

Mangena said the decision to convert all these non-purchasing customers’ meters follows a routine inspection that exposed prepaid meters that have not been vending for a period of three months and above.

“The numbers of such meters are alarming, with over 10 000 being in affluent areas, with others, worryingly, belonging to businesses.”

Mangena said City Power has spent millions of rands in installing smart meters across Johannesburg and deplores this behaviour from customers who are sitting with non-vending meters only so that they can “enjoy free electricity.”

“These customers do not only fiddle with the electricity equipment which may cause network overload and subsequently prolonged outages but also our ability to provide a reliable power supply and hinders our capacity to collect the much-needed revenue. City Power as a whole is sitting with around R10 billion debt from non-paying customers.”

Tampering

Mangena urged residents to desist from tampering with electricity infrastructure by bypassing meters as this is not only a criminal offense but may lead to the circuit malfunctioning in the area.

“As a result of a circuit malfunction, customers may start experiencing power surges and equipment shocking them in their homes, which may cause fires, serious injuries, or even fatalities.”

He said customers who have not been vending for more than three months and are found to have bypassed their meters will be automatically converted to post-paid meters.

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