City Power and Eskom are at work to ensure that the Houtkoppen Substation is at equilibrium.
A meeting hosted by Ward 101 councillor Ralf Bittkau informed the community how the various entities such as City Power and the MMC of Environment and Infrastructure Service, would respond to the electricity problem.
According to Bittkau, “Eskom finally fixed their problem and only then did City Power realise that there was a cable problem in North Riding.”
Acting CEO of City Power, Tshifularo Mashava, said “Eskom would only provide extra capacity in 2030, therefore, City Power has committed themselves to go out to the market, like the City of Johannesburg, to procure their power so that they can give extra capacity.”
Mashava added that budgets had been approved for next year and noted the issue of cable theft assuring residents that they had not been deterred by these criminal activities.
City Power’s multidisciplinary team presented a ‘locality plan’ and noted the issue on the 11kV downstream network where distributors were too long and ran through undeveloped areas. The rise of cable theft led Plant Out of Service (POS) to overload trips after load-shedding and migration blocks. “Short and medium-term solutions revolve around reducing distributor lengths by inserting Ring Main Units and replacing portions with a high number of joints.”
Mashava also addressed the issue of overload. She said City Power received a percentage of power from Eskom but doesn’t generate electricity. “We cannot stop development in the city because that is how our economy grows. Our responsibility as City Power is to have an infrastructure master plan that takes into account the growth of the City of Johannesburg, but then the independency? We must go to Eskom to ask for extra capacity and at this point, unfortunately, they are not able to give [it to] us.”
MMC of Environment and Infrastructure Michael Sun said he would add to the internal processes that City Power had to evaluate their projects. “I will add another layer of evaluation monetary on behalf of the residents to ensure that where your monies are paid, they are spent properly without corruption and it’s going to work for you.”
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