Johannesburg - Ekurhuleni substations have had over 400 power failures in the past two years. The worst problems were at the 48-year-old Brakpan town substation, with 24 outages.
The best performers included Sharon Park, Dunnottar Three Shaft, Germiston Rietcons, Germiston Unions, the Springs Bulk and the Springs municipal substations. These are all at least 60 years old but all ran without a single outage for two years. Ekurhuleni has 62 substations but only a third managed to run for two years without a breakdown.
This is contained in information given to Parliament by Minister of Public Enterprises Lynne Brown in response to a question by DA MP Gordon MacKay.
The minister was also asked for details of the maintenance schedule for each substation, but said a detailed breakdown wasn’t possible.
Instead, a two-page list of typical work done on transmission and distribution substations, ranging from servitude bush and oil changes to “loadshed panel protection maintenance”, defect clearing and cable maintenance was provided.
There were no details on how many of the outages were due to planned maintenance, unplanned breakdowns, or cable theft.
The good news is that about a third of the substations were upgraded in the past two years and another third are being upgraded over the next two years.
In comments to The Star, Eskom said the outages were a combination of planned maintenance and unplanned outages. The utility couldn’t say how many outages were due to theft or sabotage.
One of the substations logged 19 outages, and Eskom confirmed that it supplied power to one of the Rand Water pumping stations affected in the recent water supply problems.
The Star