More than 25 000 electricity faults reported in Cape Town
With more than 25 000 electricity faults logged in January, Cape Town's power infrastructure faces scrutiny as the city works to improve reliability.
Image: File
Thousands of electricity faults are being reported across Cape Town every month, with more than 25 000 new faults logged in January alone.
That is according to the City of Cape Town’s Electricity Generation and Distribution Performance Monitoring Report for January this year, which was tabled before the council’s energy committee.
The report shows that the city recorded 25 917 electricity fault notifications during January. Of those, 24 697 were completed by the end of the reporting period while 5 877 faults remained outstanding.
The faults include problems reported on the electricity network and issues with street lighting across the metro.
According to the report, fault notifications are logged on the city’s SAP system and are split between street lighting problems and other electricity faults affecting households and businesses.
“The breakdown of reported faults is based on the number of notifications created on SAP,” the report states.
The report also tracks the reliability of Cape Town’s electricity supply using several industry indicators that measure how often customers experience power interruptions and how long those interruptions last.
These include the Average System Interruption Frequency Index (ASIFI), which shows how often the average customer experiences a sustained interruption in a year, and the Average System Interruption Duration Index (ASIDI), which measures how long those interruptions last.
The report states that the target for ASIDI is less than three hours a year, while ASIFI should remain below 1.3 interruptions per year.
Another indicator, the Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (CAIDI), measures how long an outage lasts for a specific customer once a power interruption has occurred.
According to the report, several factors can affect the reliability of electricity supply, including vandalism, theft and the wider impact of load shedding on the power grid.
“External factors such as vandalism and the impact of load-shedding events on the grid will result in variations,” the report said.
The report also notes that some high-voltage transformers were taken out of service for maintenance or replacement over recent months.
It states that this work is necessary to maintain the reliability of the electricity network.
“The drop in HV transformer availability over the last few months results from several of these transformers being taken out of service for maintenance or replacement,” the report says.
Another section of the report focuses on public lighting across the city.
It shows the percentage of street lights and high mast lights that are working across both the city’s electricity network and Eskom supply areas.
The report notes that vandalism has been a particular challenge affecting public lighting infrastructure.
High mast lighting readings were also unavailable for September last year because law enforcement officers were not available to escort electricity staff into some affected areas.
The report also tracks the number of households connected to electricity each month through subsidised electrification programmes.
These connections include both formal housing areas and informal settlements across Cape Town.