East residents sign petition over electricity woes

Pretoria east residents who have been without power intermittently for days on end over the past few months have signed a petition demanding that, among other things, “bad” BEE practices be scrapped ahead of upgrades to two problematic substations.

This comes after months of constant power outages in areas such as Olympus, Faerie Glen, Zwavelpoort, Moreletapark and Mooikloof.

In recent years, the east of Pretoria has been prone to power cuts due to electrical trips attributed to an increase in demand that supply was unable to meet as well as ageing electricity infrastructure.

This year, problems have worsened leading to more power cuts.

A week ago, large parts of the east were left in the dark when five substations experienced a trip.

Areas such as Brummeria, Val De Grace, Lynnwood Glen, Equestria, Elarduspark and Faerie Glen were affected by the outage.

On the weekend, some areas again had to brave the cold weather without any electricity.

The Wapadrand and the Mooikloof substations have been struggling to keep up the provision of power as they experienced fires that prompted the metro to institute upgrades.

Residents have since signed a petition making demands on the upcoming upgrades to these stations.

The petition, titled Repeated Power Outages in Pretoria East, has garnered 820 signatures thus far.

In some of the demands made in the petition, the residents demanded that an independent electrical consulting firm be appointed as technical oversight of Wapadrand substation upgrades.

“This consulting company should report directly to the mayor’s office and not to the COO or electricity department,” the petition reads.

“This should take the form of a mayoral oversight committee and potentially also add water and sanitation later in a similar arrangement.

“The electrical consulting company should be appointed purely on merit. Any other criteria like BEE, preferential procurement and other bad procurement practices should be dropped.”

Peter Sutton, the interim MMC for Utility Services, said preliminary investigations found that most outages in the areas under review were a result of “normal” cable faults.

He said in some cases, cable faults happened in the secondary substation’s main and ring feeders but were cleared or tripped in the primary substation.

“Most of the secondary substations are using old switchgear and protection relays. It’s difficult to confirm if all switchgear trips when there are cable faults or they trip from the primary substation,” he said.

More time was needed to do a thorough investigation on the mentioned network with the assistance of region 6. After the conclusion of the investigation, it will be decided whether some substations related to these trips require technical audit tests.

Responding to the petition, Sutton said the metro reserved its right to undertake its own technical investigation. Should customers want an independent investigation, it can only be attended to by Nersa who will appoint their consultant to determine the level of the City’s compliance with its licence conditions.

“The City is part of government and cannot go against supply chain management regulations and policy,” he said.

“Therefore, the suggestion that someone can determine who the City appoints without following its policy will not be considered as that will be in direct conflict with the constitution.”

He said B-BBEE policy was a government policy and the City would continue to implement it.

There were also councillors and established oversight committees in place to monitor projects such as these.

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