City Power's announcement of a range of measures, including load reduction, that have been implemented to reduce high electricity consumption and protect the grid from total collapse has been met with sharp criticism that the entity is blaming residents instead of owning up to its failures.
This is according to experts and comes after the entity announced load reduction from Monday and the intensified implementation of ripple relay systems and cut-off operations in high-consumption areas.
Load reduction will take place during peak times from 6am to 10am and 4pm to 10pm “in high-density areas and suburbs with concerning usage levels that threaten to overload the electricity equipment”, City Power said in a statement at the weekend.
City Power also announced it would implement load limiting, through smart meters, in July.
Energy experts Chris Yelland and Liziwe McDaid weighed in on this announcement.
Yelland said that load reduction was not unique to Johannesburg as Eskom had been doing the same thing for years, mainly to target electricity theft.
“Obviously in winter, when [the weather] is cold, people use more electricity and the transformer gets overloaded, and if there's a lot of electricity theft taking place, that transformer will be overloaded quicker and then [the same thing will happen to] another one.
“Electricity theft is just one of the reasons that causes overloading. There are other reasons for it, [but] the problem is when they switch it off ... they're not only switching off those who don't pay for electricity, but the whole neighbourhood. So that causes great frustration,” he said.
Yelland said the cause of the overloading was an influx of people into areas, which causes a substantial increase in demand. This includes people moving from rural areas to the city. This becomes an issue when the city neglects to do maintenance or upgrade its equipment, often due to financial constraints.
“The utility, in this case City Power, may have neglected to upgrade the system to cope with the extra number of people. When you're City Power, you constantly need to plan your network and upgrade it as you see the demand for electricity increasing in a particular area.
“You've got to put in more transformers [and] more cables to keep up with the growth and if you don't do that, you'll reach a stage where that network is overloaded.”
Yelland said while there are instances where illegal connections are to blame for the overload, for the most part City Power was blaming residents for using more electricity instead of fixing the issues at hand.
The utility, in this case City Power, may have neglected to upgrade the system to cope with the extra number of people. When you're City Power, you constantly need to plan your network and upgrade it as you see the demand for electricity increasing in a particular area.
— Chris Yelland
“It's like they are blaming residents for using more electricity. They should be blaming themselves for not keeping up with the demand and investing properly. Instead of investing, they've used the money for other things, then we end up in a situation where we have load reduction.
"[For the most part it's] poor planning, lack of investment in new infrastructure and [a failure to] upgrade infrastructure to keep up with the population growth. A significant portion is caused by poor planning and [investment]. The other part is electricity theft and it's a combination of both.”
He also warned that there could be a repeat of this issue in other big metros across Gauteng as winter progresses and it could be worsened by poor planning and investment.
“It's been happening in Eskom areas all over the place ... and it's probably inevitable that the planning problems in Joburg are no different to Ekurhuleni and Tshwane. It's caused by rapid urbanisation and a failure to do adequate planning to keep up with this,” he said.
Liziwe McDaid, strategic lead at The Green Connection, questioned the process City Power followed before resorting to these measures as well as the National Energy Regulator of South Africa's (Nersa) role.
“Has the City of Joburg just unilaterally decided on this, what consultation did they have and where is Nersa? Those would be my initial [questions].
“Overall, if the city knew this was going to be happening, what steps have they taken? Is there a feed-in policy in place for example for businesses that have solar panels on the roof or batteries installed for them to sell to City Power to get more power into the system,” she said, citing a similar move the City of Cape Town has implemented.
“If water heating is taking up 50% of the load, what's their incentive to put in solar water heaters? Both to maybe encourage the richer areas to do it but also to provide to those poorer households because that will automatically help with their consumption.
“It sounds like they're just blaming people for using electricity in winter, which surely should've been expected. And if there are indigent or poor households who can't afford electricity, what have they done to help subsidise them, because often people don't pay and they use illegal connections because it's freezing and they are desperate,” she added.
Both experts weighed in on the effectiveness of these measures, with McDaid saying these were proposed back in 2008 “when we started having these [issues]”.
“I'm not convinced [that though] it might have a short-term impact, it's a longer-term solution. And they also don't seem to have a longer-term solution because ripple relay is just shifting your load, but presumably more and more people are coming onto the grid and the city's growing, what's their long-term policy solution?”
“You have to work on a whole number of things simultaneously. It's not one solution to everything. So for example, you have to start investing [and] replacing old equipment with new equipment,” Yelland said.
“This idea of what the call ripple control receivers ... these kind of devices have been around a long time and they've just been neglected and not installed. They should've installed them years ago, they're waking up to the problem now. If you're a good distributor of electricity, you do all of these things and keep up with demand. It's not a one-off thing ... you never stop working on it.”
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