Joburg City Power running out of minisubstations amid theft, vandalism

JOBURG power utility City Power is unable to keep up with the high demand for minisubstations owing to the higher stages of loadshedding, and is losing an average of two minisubstations a day owing to theft and vandalism across its service delivery centres, with the hardest hit being Roodepoort.

“The impact of loadshedding on our infrastructure is high, with minisubstations and transformers blowing up or being stolen. Since the recent higher stages of loadshedding, City Power has been losing minisubstations faster than we can replenish them,” it says.

By 18 January, City Power was in need of at least 14 minisubstation boxes to deal with several outages in different areas. The 14 minisubstations – eight in Roodepoort, four in the Reuven service delivery centre, one in Randburg and one in Midrand – were vandalised.

Over the past year, in which State-owned power utility Eskom has imposed at least 205 days of loadshedding, City Power replaced more than 390 minisubstations at a cost of R200-million. This is the reason it has currently run