Maritzburg faces power crisis

2006-03-20 08:28

Pietermaritzburg - Pietermaritzburg is heading in the same direction as Cape Town with the possibility of ongoing power failures - only this time Eskom isn't to blame but the city's own internal system.

Sources within the municipality say the system is failing because there has only been sporadic maintenance carried out for the past six to seven years and there are no qualified and experienced staff to do the work.

They say the electricity department has hardly any electricians. While planning technicians have been given jobs, not a single electrician has been employed in the past seven years.

The problem is compounded by the number of new developments mushrooming in the city, straining an already overworked network. There has been inadequate planning for the additional load and the situation has been worsened by stringent budget cuts.

The prognosis for this coming winter doesn't look good. During these months of heavy demand for power, a rotational load shedding system is worked out by which electricity is switched off for an hour or more in different areas. So far there has been no planning for such a system for this winter.

Sources have described the city?s electricity department as a sinking ship. Last year there was a major trip and power went off in three quarters of the city.

Sinking ship 'captainless'

Publicly the department blamed Eskom but the fault was internal. Blaming Eskom means that there is no scrutiny of the department's inadequacies and these are the issues that the new council has to address, according to staff.

They allege that the sinking ship is captainless as the process manager or head, Simphiwe Mchunu, has been away for extended periods on stress leave. His last lengthy absence was from December to mid-February.

According to sources, Eskom has played its role in helping the city cope with an increased demand for electricity.

The city had two feeder systems from the power utility receiving 200 megawatts of electricity and these were becoming overloaded.

An agreement was reached for a third feeder system to be built in the Edendale area to be fed off an Eskom grid from Thornville. Once the third system is in place and the load is moved across the city will have the capacity to receive more power.

So what's going wrong?

It seems the power coming in from Eskom is being fed into a system of aging sub-stations that haven't been maintained. In addition the city is growing at an alarming rate, yet the municipality isn't putting in enough sub-stations to keep up with the growth, nor are plans being prepared by the forward planning department for new sub-stations. The experts believe that if councillors investigate they will find that the forward planning department has no funds.

There is a crisis in the making, they say, and this can be seen by the increasing number of breakdowns and faults in the network.

- The Witness