City Power receives award despite Region C crisis

Residents might be surprised to learn that Joburg’s electricity entity, City Power, scooped up a much-coveted service award in Cape Town recently.

It was selected Power Utility of the Year at the Africa Utility Awards last week.

According to City Power MD, Sicelo Xulu, “We are pleased that once again, diligent work by our teams has been recognised and acknowledged.”

Xulu regards the award as an affirmation of the hard work of the staff – a stark contrast to the frequent service delivery failures across the city, in particular the supply failures in Florida in the past month.

Instead, CoJ chooses to focus on the utility’s introduction of a range of interventions to curtail power consumption and lessen the likelihood of load-shedding in recent months. One move it boasts about is ‘load limiting’, which has only served to enrage complying residents of Roodepoort. This process sees the utility remotely monitoring household power consumption and requesting reduced consumption when it is deemed necessary. In the event of non-compliance, the power is then remotely disconnected. Not only has this enraged paying residents, it carries with it the potential for destroying electrical appliances by summarily switching power off and on. The damaging of property has long been another burden on residents’ shoulders, thanks to frequent unpredictable load-shedding, especially in 2015.

Another problematic attempt to innovate is a City Power move called ‘ripple control’ by means of which geysers are remotely disconnected during periods of constrained supply. All this achieves is to punish undeserving, paying consumers.

In the mean time, large-scale electricity theft, in particular in Princess and Davidsonville has enjoyed low priority.

This morning (Monday 23 May), Ward 70 councillor David Dewes called City Power’s moves ‘band-aid approaches’. He is enraged that Noel Maso, previously Region C’s disappointing depot manager, has been promoted despite “plunging the greater Florida area into a crisis”. He alleged that lack of budget and essential spares as well as neglected critical maintenance has allowed the understaffed Region C depot to fall into such a crisis that City Power’s head office has been forced to access emergency funds to remedy it.

Is the service you receive from City Power award-winning stuff? Let us know via email to mathildem@caxton.co.za

What is Africa Utility Week?

Africa Utility Week is a leading annual power and water industry function, attracting over 6 000 attendees and 80 utilities to its ceremony annually, said City of Johannesburg (CoJ) in a recent press statement.

The award recognises the African power utility that excels in one or more of the following fields: service delivery, project roll-out, technology roll-out, revenue protection measures, loss reduction, grid integration and new energy sources, expenditure reduction, increased capacity to deliver services, revenue collection, and completion of infrastructure development or sustainable maintenance projects.

City Power competed against other utilities from Ghana and Kenya, among them Ghana Grid Company Limited, KenGen, Kenya Power and Lighting Company Limited and Volta River Authority.

Do you perhaps have more information pertaining to this story? Email us at roodepoortrecord@caxton.co.za (remember to include your contact details) or phone us on 011 955 1130.

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