Ekurhuleni’s power supply on verge of being shut down

In an ominous warning for South Africa’s large metros, the City of Ekurhuleni is said to be on the verge of going dark as its electricity department battles ageing and overloaded infrastructure, rampant illegal connections, bad debt and a critical lack of skills.

Some local councillors are expecting this doomsday scenario to happen soon, while city management says otherwise. Ekurhuleni’s electricity infrastructure has reached middle age, with most if it tracking 38 years.

This, according to city spokesperson Zweli Dlamini, is the primary cause of the roughly 1 500 daily outages, as reported on the council’s EMIS (municipal information system).

“Outages do not necessarily relate to maintenance. The city has challenges relating to ageing infrastructure, vandalism of existing infrastructure and overloading of the current network, mostly due to illegal connections.

“Constant vandalism of the network through theft of underground and overhead cables is a major contributor to outages.

“The energy department consistently spends 95% of its maintenance and refurbishment budget and capex budget on the maintenance and refurbishment of electrical equipment, as well as the upgrading of substations,” says Dlamini.

Yet, the energy budget was slashed by R100 million in December and an additional R67 million was cut in January.

Of the National Energy Regulator of SA recommended staff complement of 1 600, there are currently just over 700 vacant posts. According to Dlamini, 53 electrical engineers are currently appointed in various positions.

“The public lighting section consists of 136 employees which is made up by engineers, electricians, artisan assistants, streetlight maintenance workers and general workers.”

According to the site municipalities.co.za, this staff complement services around one million electrified households, thousands of streetlights and key industrial areas like Wadeville, Isando and Kempton Park, among others.

Democratic Alliance caucus spokesman Bradley Dubbelman insists there is a crisis.

“The number of outages and length of outages are increasing with time. It has got to a situation where industry is slowly losing faith as a reliable power supply cannot be guaranteed. Industry needs regular power.

“Several officials in the department have stated on the record that the current infrastructure will start collapsing in certain areas within six months.

“With the increase of cable and electricity theft, this further complicates the issue.” Dlamini partly blames the Covid-19 pandemic for significant revenue losses by the city, resulting in severe budget cuts.

He says Ekurhuleni lost R1.2 billion last year. Capital expenditure was cut by more than 30% from R7.9 billion to R4.6 billion.

Presently, the metro’s revenue collection rate is below 90% and it only has 13 days’ cash on hand, 17 days short of National Treasury’s 30-day stability recommendation.

Dlamini says the most affected area of the city’s functions is revenue collection.

“Although we had identified cash collection, account enquiries and billing as essential services, during the higher levels of lockdown, the city had to suspend certain revenue value chain services, including credit control, disconnections and meter reading.”

According to sources inside the council, this amounts to a shortfall of about R18 billion in rates and services collections.

“Despite the many unique challenges that confront us, we have been able to create and sustain a city that can proudly boast of rendering sustainable services and keep afloat,” says Dlamini.

“We do have the human and other resources and the resilience to overcome this challenge. It is our view that at this time of great need, our macroeconomic response must not only be about high-level fiscal and monetary variables. Our intervention must talk to the needs of our people, particularly the poor and vulnerable.”

But, says Dubbelman, businesses are looking for alternatives, downsizing or shutting down entirely.

Several companies have turned to self-generation solutions, creating limited amounts of power themselves while continuing to voice concerns over the amount of down-time due to city outages.

news@citizen.co.za

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