Tshwane mayor promises to tackle city’s ageing infrastructure after major power outage

Tshwane mayor Nasiphi Moya said there was no need to panic after a section of the Kwagga electricity substation went up in flames on Thursday night and left more than half of the capital in the dark.

Moya, who was elected mayor on Wednesday after being acting mayor for the past two weeks, had her hands full with three substations damaged in the past two weeks.

Kwagga outage left 58% of Tshwane powerless

“We had a couple of outages, of which the main outage was the Kwagga substation which left 58% of the residents in Tshwane without power for a couple of hours.

“I can confirm all the areas have been energised, also Soshanguve is on, Pyramid is on,” she said.

“For the past 10 days, there has been an outage in the area supplied by the Pyramid substation that was re-energised early yesterday morning.

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“In Soshanguve where we had a case of theft and vandalism, we were able to energise the substation yesterday, even though we were planning to energise by Sunday,” she said.

Tshwane mayor says it’s not sabotage

Moya said it was not a crisis, nor was it sabotage.

“It’s been unfortunate incidents that have inconvenienced the residents of Tshwane.

“What is important is the teams were responsive and the councillors were on the ground to ensure residents had information and not to cause panic – that the city of Tshwane was burning. There was no such thing,” she said.

She said they initially feared the transformer would take longer to restore.

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“Initially, the team made their assessment and found it was a technical issue.

“We have aged infrastructure so what happened was that it was a failure due to a technical fault,” she said.

Electricity minister commends Tshwane

Moya was joined by Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, who said the fact that the municipality restored the major failure in a turnaround time of less than 24 hours was commendable.

“We need to initiate several interventions in the long term. We have made the point that the ageing infrastructure presents a significant risk to the availability of electricity.

“It’s an isolation failure on a substation constructed in 1973, so we are talking about infrastructure about 51 years old,” he said.

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Ramokgopa said his department was introducing pilot projects with municipalities to refurbish aged infrastructure.

“Many municipalities’ financial positions were significantly compromised and that undermines their ability to invest the required amount of capital to refurbish their infrastructure.

Ramokgopa said Tshwane was one of two municipalities the department chose to work with on a pilot project on the issues of debt and refurbishing the infrastructure with the technology they borrowed during the state visit to China with President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“Every province will get two pilot sites which will be rolled out aggressively in the future,” he said.