CoE comments on electricity network upgrades in Germiston
Morgan presented that Germiston has one of the oldest energy networks in Ekurhuleni, however, it had no upgrades done since the metro was established 21 years ago.
The City of Ekurhuleni (CoE) recently responded to complaints about the lack of maintenance and upgrade of electricity infrastructure in Germiston. This came after a presentation to residents during a virtual town hall meeting on February 27 held by Ward 36 Clr Wendy Morgan, MP Michele Clarke and hosted by Ward 39 Clr Alta de Beer.
The presentation was meant to give residents feedback on a meeting held by the councillors with CoE’s head of the energy department. De Beer acknowledged that the CoE was not invited to the meeting.
Morgan said that Germiston has one of the oldest energy networks in Ekurhuleni and that no upgrades had been done since the metro’s establishment 21 years ago.
She said maintenance had not been done in the past 18 months due to resource constraints and that a new contractor was appointed to focus on substation maintenance for each depot.
“A contractor should be in operation from March,” said Morgan.
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The CoE subsequently commented that the energy department had upgraded the Germiston network, which included the Germiston Technical College substation, Germiston North substation and Hughes settlement substation.
CoE stated that the installation of high voltage cables included:
• Second Input substation to Albemarle substation.
• Albemarle substation to Chapman substation.
• Chapman substation to Germiston Technical College substation.
• Germiston Technical College substation to Germiston North substation.
• Roodekop to Trident substation.
• Union 44 kV substation to Consol Glass substation.
• Wadeville DS to Consol Glass substation.
• Atom to Second Input substation.
• Elsburg to Georgetown substation.
• Technical College to Georgetown substation.
• Technical College to James Bright substation.
• Technical College to Wychwood substation.
The metro said the upgrade of medium cables were done in Sunnyridge, Lambton, Norton small farms and Union township, Leondale, Wadeville industrial area, Elandshaven Hughes settlement, Wilbart, Sunnyrock, Marlands, Elsburg, Phumula, from James bright to Germiston Extension 4 and Tunney.
The above response was the only comment received from the CoE on concerns raised during the meeting despite GCN’s attempts to obtain feedback on other issues raised.
GCN questioned the city’s budget spend, theft of equipment, ageing equipment and communication procedures after the following concerns were also raised:
Theft of equipment
• One of the main contributors to outages.
• Due to ageing equipment, a ripple effect is caused when the local substation trips, causing a trip at the second Eskom input.
• Switchgear at the second input is old causing the network to be down between four to 16 hours.
At the meeting, residents were informed that all substations will be equipped with trigger alarms to armed response companies and vibration detention alarms will be installed on hotpot cables for early detection of cable theft.
The public was also requested to report suspicious digging to the energy department with location and photos.
Ageing equipment
• The largest contributor to long outages.
• Repair teams spend many hours detecting the source of the problem.
• Two major substations in serious need of upgrade are Technical College and Second Input.
• Second Input from Eskom can trip due to minor issues on the network.
Residents were informed that the budget was made available for two switchgear equipment kits required to upgrade the Second Input and that the estimated delivery period is 10 months.
Two units from the Boksburg project will be reallocated to Germiston to speed up the upgrade. “Modifications required and estimated period for installation of three months. This will assist in stabilising the network,” said Morgan. It was announced that the rebuilding and installation of two substations will take about 19 months. “A report from the department was supposed to be available for this meeting, but nothing was received,” said Morgan.
Communication
Residents were reminded that all calls must have a reference number to aid the escalation process. Feedback presented at the meeting was that the COO will then ensure communication on social media platforms on area outages, streamline the process between the communications department and the call centre for more accurate reporting and nominate a senior staff member to be part of the energy escalation group.
“The head of the energy will ensure that Germiston engineers put the necessary actions in place within his team to communicate area outages and the progress on the energy escalation group.”
CoE was asked to provide the feedback presented by the councillor and provide additional comment on other concerns raised. None was received at the time of going to print.
We rate CoE’s feedback to the media and residents
• As your trusted community newspaper, GCN receives many service delivery complaints. Although the local media is a news platform and not a service delivery complaints platform, we take pride in being your community watchdog that holds those in power accountable.
Through regular liaising and relationship building with our local authorities, we are often able to update readers on municipal matters in the public interest.
GCN wants to ensure consistent and quality feedback from the City in response to our media queries. To monitor this GCN is introducing a 5-star rating system.
We rely on our readers’ pressing questions to the CoE and we will be rating their response according to a 5-star scoring system allocated as follows: Two stars will equate to all questions answered (either direct or indirect); two stars will equate to the relevance of answers to questions posed; the remaining star will be attributed to adherence to the deadline for comment.
GCN rated CoE’s response one out of five stars: Half a star for some questions answered, half a star for answer’s relevance and zero stars for deadline met.
Contact the newsroom by emailing: Marietta Lombard (Editor) germistoncitynews@caxton.co.za, or (Journalists) Busi Vilakazi busiv@caxton.co.za , and Lebogang Sekgwama lebogangs@caxton.co.za.
