CITY Power has less than 50 days to improve public lighting and revenue collection, install protective structures and remove illegal connections as part of the mayor’s 90-day Accelerated Service Delivery Plan.
These objectives fall into six chosen focus areas, the others being demand side management, improving the performance of the LV network and meter readings, installing check meters, and communicating all achievements. These will need to be implemented within the 90 days, which end at the end of September.
The Accelerated Service Delivery Plan was introduced by Executive Mayor Parks Tau during his maiden budget speech, in which he said the first 90 days of office would be about returning to basics, from road maintenance, cutting grass, reducing power outages and cleaning informal settlements, to addressing illegal dumping, among others.
Tau said the City would spend an estimated R33-billion in the 2011/2012 fiscal year in addressing service delivery imperatives and building and maintaining major infrastructure. In the budget, he allocated R11,2-billion to City Power to reduce electricity outages, repair street lights and roll out smart electricity meters to reduce illegal connections.
Patrick Radebe, City Power’s safety, health and environmental quality co-ordinator, said that as the company attempted to meet the deadline, it was grappling with budgetary and capacity constraints and the lack of scarce skills.
Nonetheless, the objectives of the 90-day programme would be met. “This is an opportunity for us to prove ourselves by doing well what we do as routine, but this time do it under the pressure of the days set for the accomplishment of this task,” he said.
Targets
The utility’s asset maintenance planner, Mandla Magadla, said the 90-day programme had “clear cut targets and objectives for me. They are short term and remind us of what we need to be doing well to service the people of Johannesburg”.
Proper planning had ensured that the utility was more focused than before. “For instance, a number of streets have been identified for public lighting fixing. We will now attend to them, street by street as identified on our plan.”
The public relations and communications general manager, Sol Masolo, who is also responsible for raising awareness of the 90-day programme, said his division had already visited scrap yard dealers in City Power’s supply areas and three owners had been arrested for possession of stolen copper wires.
The utility had also embarked on internal and external road shows to create further awareness of its work. “We are using industrial theatre to carry through the message about the key focus areas,” he said.
“We are compacted on this 90 days from the City on what we need to do,” Msomi added, urging people to report anomalies to City Power on either Facebook or Twitter.
Nkanyiso Msomi, the acting director of engineering services, said the utility had spent about R7-billion improving its bulk infrastructure, including substations. “Now it is time to take on that load and use those substations.”
Msomi said the remainder of the 90 days would be about operational efficiency. “It is really about going back to basics and doing the things we need to do right, the first time.”
Future
Magadla said the 90-day programme represented City Power’s future plans. “That’s a challenge over which we have a better control over just because we will have more time to relook at our operations and fine tune them as we go along.”
In addition, City Power has formed an energy sharing partnership with Singapore. It has bought innovative test equipment designed to assess the condition of its electrical network.
Patrick O’Halloran, the utility’s manager of technology, said the condition monitoring test equipment was able to detect a fault on the equipment before a failure occurred. It would enable the utility to detect potential faults, identify their location and root cause, rectify them and ensure the safety of staff and communities by preventing the failure.
“We will improve our reliability and quality of supply every time we prevent a failure, which normally results in customer outages.”
O’Halloran noted that the test equipment was able to detect defects on cables, transformers, switchgears and other electrical equipment.
He said City Power’s monitoring strategy sought to improve reliability and quality of supply, have fewer faults that weakened its electrical network, limit the number of forced outages and shorten downtime if faults occurred.
“We’ll make big inroads to the problems we have not been able to detect before equipment failed in the past.”
The Accelerated Service Delivery Plan is part of the mayor’s drive to get the City functioning optimally. It started in June and ends at the end of September.
Source: Joburg.org.za