Pretoria – Joburg’s power utility, City Power, said it is working tirelessly to address the increasing failure of its back-up batteries at several of its major substations, which is the reason for extended outages after Eskom’s bouts of blackouts.
City Power CEO Tshifularo Mashava said Joburg residents had recently encountered many prolonged outages following hours of load shedding, which led to an increase in outage calls from customers.
“The impact of load shedding on our fleet of backup batteries is huge, coupled with the fact that some of them are old. The batteries have an eight-hour lifespan during load shedding downtime, and are meant to play back-up during the blackouts and assists when we restore power remotely,” she said.
“Rampant load shedding, especially the higher stages we find ourselves in is exposing our aged network, especially the substation batteries.
“Most of our substations that do not come back on stream after load shedding is due to the batteries which are unable to last for a four-hour load shedding bout to enable remote switching. This is forcing us to send operators around to manually do fault finding and switch on the network.”
She said City Power has initiated a R30 million programme to ramp up the repairs of the battery system, and the replacement of the old batteries to ensure the utility cut down on interruptions after load shedding.
"We currently don’t have enough budget to address all the substations but we are moving funds around to address the most critical areas,” said Mashava.
City Power said the recent impact of the battery problem was felt in Roodepoort on Thursday, which saw customer calls spiking from 575 in the morning to 909 by late evening. This was due to the Nursery substation not coming back into service after hours of load shedding.
“On investigation we found that the reason for the substation tripping after load shedding was the increased wear-and-tear on the aged batteries at the substation.
“The substation is one of our first priorities in our battery replacement programme, but it will take a couple of weeks to resolve due to long lead times for the delivery of batteries,” she said.
The Nursery substation feeds six substations downstream including William Nicole, Fieldhouse, Jan Smuts, Florida, Mechanical Workshop, and Maraisburg.
“This explains why the impact was huge on customers, leading to calls spiking to almost a 1 000. Our team worked the entire Thursday night until Friday morning, managing to restore five of the six substations by 4am, with Mechanical Workshop attended to on Friday morning,” Mashava said.
“We will also prioritise William Nicole, Jan Smuts, Maraisburg, Mechanical Workshop, Reefhaven, and Penny Street substations in our battery replacement programme.
“We again request our communities to be patient while we are working hard through the challenges to ensure availability of power supply to our Roodepoort customers,” she said.
City Power said the Roodepoort area was still recovering from the devastating effects of the December, 2022 adverse weather, the consistently high stages of load shedding, and persistently high rates of theft and vandalism.
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