City Power has no mini-substations because of theft and load-shedding

Hundreds of households supplied by City Power will be powerless for a few days because the electricity provider has run out of mini-substations to replace those which are vandalised or damaged due to higher stages of load-shedding. 

“More mini-substations have been ordered and we are expecting deliveries from this week because of  the long lead time and festive closure of most factories,” City Power said on Thursday. 

On average, one mini-substation supplies 100 households.

By Wednesday, City Power was in need of at least 14 mini-substation boxes to deal with several outages in different areas.  All were vandalised, eight of them in Roodepoort.

It said the areas affected by vandalised mini-substations in Roodepoort include Lufhereng, Roodepoort CBD, JG Strydom, Witpoortjie, Wilgeheuwel and Weltevreden.

“Unfortunately, these areas and those in other service delivery centres cannot be restored until we receive more mini-substations. We appeal for calm and patience from our customers as we work hard to address this shortage,” City Power said.

City Power said it had been losing an average of two mini-substations a day through theft and vandalism across its service delivery centres, with the hardest-hit being Roodepoort. 

“The impact of load-shedding is high on our infrastructure, with mini-substations and transformers blowing up or being stolen,” City Power sad.

It said that in the past year, in which Eskom imposed at least 205 days of load-shedding, it replaced more than 390 mini-substations at a cost of R200m. 

“The impact of high demand on mini-substations has left a huge dent in our budget and as it is we have already spent 80% of our budget for the whole financial year.” 

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