Residents of Raithbay Village express outrage over Eskom's power outages

A meeting held on Thursday, September 19 provided Eskom with an opportunity to give feedback to the community of Raithby Village and the surrounding farms, in Stellenbosch, about the power outages that residents said have been the case in the past two years.

Officials from the power utility engaged with residents at the Raithby Village Methodist Church Hall during an afternoon meeting organised by Stellenbosch Municipality.

Since early last year, the residents said the frequency of power outages increased and that it took much longer for Eskom to repair.

The power outages appeared strange, as certain houses in the same street would have power while others had no power, residents told Eskom officials in attendance. 

Angus Mouton, Eskom's plant manager in the Western Cape, said the utility's network, traditionally rural, is transitioning into a densely urban network due to the rapid pace of developments.

“There is a huge investment in this area. It is growing exponentially fast. And we, as Eskom, are struggling to keep up with the pace of this expansion of the developments in the area,” he said.

Mr Mouton said the power transformers are the primary equipment needed to supply areas, which takes approximately three years to manufacture. He added that the last major fault they had was in July of this year.

“We would analyze and look at every fault and see what actions we can put in place to reduce these faults from happening. But at this stage, it is cable underground networks," he said, adding that the City was broadening the roads around R101 and the further off roads.

He said every time they expanded the road reserve, their cables got damaged in the process which means that the cables had to be repaired.

"And once you start repairing a cable that has been undisturbed for more than 30 to 40 years, you are introducing new elements, new joints and (electrical) terminations on those cables,” he said.

He said their immediate task would be to find out why it takes contractors longer to restore a fault.

“We should not have more than three days where there's more than one or a couple of houses affected. It should definitely have been addressed by that time. And that's really where we want to come in and analyze,” he said.

Sicelo Ngxonono, a senior advisor planning at Eskom, said his team analyses the current loading in the network, does load forecasting, and identifies any future problems that may come.

He said there was a plan to build a Macassar substation to help deload existing substations in the surrounding areas.

“So, that project in Macassar, Eskom identified it, but luckily, the City of Cape Town also, because of some of the load that they needed to supply, they actually pushed that project forward. That project is currently happening, and the designs are already done,” he said.

Residents were also workshopped about solar installation - the registration process, compliance, and costs.

Mr Mouton committed to undertaking a comprehensive study into the root cause of the power outages in Raithby Village and to subsequently present his findings to the community.

The chairperson of the Raithby Ratepayers' Association, Adolf Delport, welcomed the commitment by Eskom to perform a study of the problems.

“The ratepayers found it strange that some of the outages in Raithby and the surrounding farms were not known by Eskom when reports of outages are submitted to Eskom as and when outages occur, by our councillor. We hope that power outages will reduce and that preventive maintenance of infrastructure will take place,” he said.