Saxonwold faces more than load-shedding
Residents in Saxonwold spent whole weekend without power.
Homes in Saxonworld were left without power for two nights from April 15 to 16 because of a substation power failure in their area.
Marcelle Ravid, secretary of the Saxonwold and Parkwood Residents Association (Sapra) said the area has been experiencing problems with the substation for at least two years. The power outages became worse when stage four load-shedding was introduced. The substation located at Cotswold and Engelwold drives trips constantly. Even today, despite reporting the issue to City Power, Ravid has not received a response.
He added that the substation works with only two fuses instead of nine. SAPRA decided to fix the substation by themselves as the infrastructure is old and more fuses are needed to make the substation not trip.
Ward 117 councillor Tim Truluck explained that Saxonwold was initially fed from two different load centres, Parkhurst and Rosebank. But as the network fails, City Power struggles to make repairs as they have no material and often not enough manpower. So, they backed power from other load centres. He also said the problem then, is that the load increases on that load centre and this causes frequent trips.
“In the case of this weekend’s outage in parts of Saxonwold, Parkwood, Forest Town, Parkview, and Parktown North the Forest Town load centre was back fed a while ago when a main line from the Parkhurst load centre failed. It was this that kept tripping, said Truluck.”
City Power spokesperson, Isaac Mangena said, “The main reason that is causing these trips is due to overloaded circuits. Simplified, tripping means the interruption in electricity supply which occurs when protective relays sense a fault, either from overload, equipment failure, cable fault or other factors. The circuit breaker trips to isolate the faulty lines from the rest of the healthy sections.”
He further explained that materials required for repairs are increasingly becoming difficult to source, as is gets depleted faster than they procure. For example, they have so far this year used 27 000 cable joints – an amount they used in three years in the previous years.
Truluck suggested that households and businesses get a solar, battery, and inverter system that can help mitigate the increasingly frequent multiple-day outages that will all be experiencing in the foreseeable future.
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