Durban - As the eThekwini Municipality battles with frequent power outages, it has emerged that six to eight major substations, which were among those damaged in the floods in April last year, are in urgent need of repair and could cost the City almost R400 million to fix.
In addition, there are also medium voltage substations that need repair work at an estimated cost of R150m.
Head of Electricity Maxwell Mthembu said in an interview with The Mercury this week that the City had 120 major high voltage substations that were affected by the floods and six to eight of these were in urgent need of repairs.
The critical state of the City’s electricity infrastructure was laid bare in a joint statement it released with Eskom in July last year where it was announced that the municipality would only implement load shedding from stage 4 upwards.
EThekwini had been exempt from load shedding from the time of the floods until August 1 last year.
Mthembu spoke on the challenges that are faced by the unit after the City worked to restore power in Prospecton. Part of the area had been without power for an extended period following a fire at a substation at Toyota and damage at another.
Mthembu said what happened at the substation at Toyota and the one that failed after that in the same area was indicative of the extent of the damage to the infrastructure and how unpredictable it had become.
“We have no technical explanation as to why that substation caught fire,” he said.
“These substations were submerged in water. Ideally, if the infrastructure is compromised in such a manner it should be changed, but at the moment we do not have the funds to deal with all the substations, so we are dealing with the ones that are critical.
“The fire and the damage at these two substations (which are among the most critical) is something that we did not anticipate, which goes to the fact that we are expecting anything to happen to them because of how severely they were compromised. There is no substation that was built to withstand that kind of damage that these have suffered,” he said.
Mthembu said it was important to limit the impact of outages, especially where the City supplies businesses.
“The reality is that 30% of the supply goes to businesses and 70% of the City’s revenue is generated by these businesses, so failing to supply these areas with power could be catastrophic for the City’s finances.
“Right now we are focused on refurbishment of the critical infrastructure, that is what we are attending to. There are between six and eight substations that we need to attend to urgently and it will cost the municipality close to R400m to deal with these substations.
“We will also need another R150m to deal with medium voltage stations,” he said.
“All our stations were affected, but more so those whose switch gears are inside, because the water was just rising inside the substation with no area to escape to. Therefore the switchgear was submerged in water,” he said.
Mthembu called on communities that were affected by the frequent power outages to be patient.
“We understand the communities’ frustration over power outages that lead to food being spoiled, we call for their patience to resolve the matter.
“City officials like the CFO’s office are giving the electricity department a lot of support.”
DA councillor Thabani Mthethwa said they had warned the City of the urgent need to attend to the stations.
He said instead, the municipality had chosen to approve spending of R20m on the Expanded Public Works Programme.
“Our view is that we were told immediately after the floods that the municipality needed to reprioritise the budget to attend to infrastructure repairs.
“The fact that they chose to spend hundreds of millions of rand on programmes which are supposed to be funded by the national government, instead of allocating those funds to fix critical infrastructure, is evidence enough that the ANC leadership is responsible for the crisis we face in eThekwini,” he said.
IFP councillor Mdu Nkosi said he hoped that the national government made good on its promise to assist the municipality with a billion rand that it had promised after the floods.
“We hope that now that the national Budget has been delivered, something will happen. It cannot be that there continues to be complaints of water and electricity outages in eThekwini,” he said.