Substation to still give challenges despite 2019 upgrade.
City Power has come out to clarify issues relating to the recently upgraded Roosevelt substation which has been the site of several power outages in the region B area of the City. City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena reminded the public that the substation was only refurbished and is not entirely brand new and therefore still having old parts that fail and cause outages. He confirmed that it is only the 88Kv switching yard and transformers that were refurbished, and with some new part installed.
“The distribution network at 11kv passing through houses – which includes mini-substations, transformer chambers, pole-mounted transformers, overhead and underground cables, etc. – is still the old 1958 network with old cables and old switchgear. As such its performance will still continue giving us challenges.”
DA Shadow MMC for Environment and Infrastructure Services and Ward 99 councillor Nicole van Dyk has been pointing to this as the biggest challenge facing City Power – the power entity’s aged, damaged and over-utilised infrastructure and network. Van Dyk explained, “Currently Johannesburg sits with an infrastructure backlog of around R170 billion, this includes roads, water and a large part power. So many substations across the City have not been upgraded effectively since the ’80s.” In addition to this, suburbs across the City have also grown exponentially since then putting a heavy strain on the current network and infrastructure.
Another big reason for these outages is the rampant theft and vandalism of City Power infrastructure such as cables. To try to mitigate such City Power has been replacing copper cables with aluminium bundle cables, which have no value to cable thieves. Mangena added, “We are doing our best with maintenance programmes in place but the old infrastructure remains. We have also started to gradually replace the old infrastructure with the new with some new parts installed every time there is repair work to be done. It’s a long-term process which we won’t finish overnight.”
In November 2019, then-Mayor of Johannesburg Herman Mashaba officially reopened the Roosevelt Park substation after a three-year R133 million upgrade of the station. Prior to this, the substation had not received any major refurbishments over the past 25 years regardless of the population growth and rise in demand for electricity in the area.
The upgrade included the replacement of old and obsolete switch gears, new 17-panel switchgear and standby board, establishing a new 88KV yard and a new state-of-the-art control panel. The substation was also able to produce additional capacity and reduce the restoration time after outages faced there since the upgrades.
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