Material shortages for Johannesburg City Power

According to Isaac Mangena, spokesperson for JCP, they have received 1 549 outage calls by the start of April 5, eight of which were regarding medium voltage (MV) calls and the rest about low voltage (LV).
He further stated their teams in all Service Delivery Centers (SDC) have been dispatched to assess the outages with other teams working on the ground to solve the problems. Roodepoort reportedly had 258 outage calls, Peter Road substation has 15 mini substations that are off, as well as Helderkruin switching station, which has 17 load centers.

Further, the lack of materials is complicating the process to repair faulty cables and mini substations.

Also read: Illegal mining activity negatively impacts Roodepoort substations

“City Power is also unable to deal with the high backlog of outage calls in the past 24 hours, as it’s running out of stock material, such as MV cables, LV cables, mini substations (MSS), Bulk Metering Kiosk, breakers, and joints. Our SDCs are battling to deal with high demands of repairs due to cable theft and vandalism, as well as multiple cable faults … Since the recent higher stages of load-shedding, City Power is having to replace more stock material faster than we can replenish them,” stated Mangena.

Also read: City Power unable to keep up with high demand for mini substations

Load-shedding is causing further issues due to overloading and inrush current, as the infrastructure wasn’t designed to be switched on and off regularly at short intervals. Thus, mini substations and transformers catch fire or simply fail and their replacement is difficult due to the low stock of material.

Continuous issues with cables, as they are old, further pose a threat.

Mangena said, “We are also encountering frequent faults since most of our cables are old, and would have been cut and repaired by joining them with new replacement cables due to the theft that is happening. As a result, whenever there is load-shedding and power returns, the surge in this power, will affect the weaker points on the cable which is often where we have joined them, and would then pop. In essence, cable faults have increased as most of the faults are happening on the cable joints that have been replaced. If there was no load-shedding, the electricity network will run smoothly.

“We are engaging our suppliers to receive more stock material to effect repairs. Most of which will arrive sometime later today and going into the coming days. City Power apologises for the inconvenience caused by this. We will continue to update customers on the Twitter page @CitypowerJHB and councillors’ WhatsApp groups,” concluded Mangena.