The Minister of Public Enterprises, Lynne Brown, has criticized the continued use of illegal connections as they not only endanger lives of citizens but also contribute to massive power outages.
Minister Brown’s comments follow the massive power outage experienced by residents of Soweto in the past few days and other areas around Gauteng. The power frequently goes out at about the same time on cold winter nights and people mistake these outages for load shedding.
Eskom has not implemented load shedding for 10 months, except for 2 hours and 20 minutes during this period. Eskom will inform its customers including municipalities and the general public before it implements load shedding.
The network overloads because too many people are trying to use a network which is designed for one household per stand. Also, customers who are not paying for their electricity tend to be wasteful in the way they use it.
“Eskom informs me that the areas that have smart metres in Soweto are unlikely to have overloading. So there is a need to accelerate smart metre deployment and for the communities to support this programme as it improves the quality of their supply and ensures safety.
Eskom installs fuses or circuit breakers that switch off when the load gets to dangerous levels, thus preventing the transformer from exploding. Sometimes residents bypass these safety features and the transformer does explode. Not only is this dangerous, but these transformers may take hours or days to repair.
I remain concerned about the safety of the communities which may be at risk due to the escalating number of illegal connections, meter bypassing or tampering (electricity theft) and vandalism to electricity infrastructure.
Illegal connections and electricity theft overstretch our resources slowing down Eskom and the municipalities’ service delivery to legal power users. This also includes overloading call centres where agents handle over a thousand calls every 30 minutes.
It is unacceptable that people are still continuing with illegal connections, while Government has a free basic electricity policy to protect the indigent from high electricity prices.
These illegal connections are putting residents and especially children at risk of being electrocuted.
Furthermore the aging infrastructure is stretched to capacity with these illegal connections.
I appeal to citizens to support Eskom’s operation Khanyisa and report illegal connections to the police,” said Minister Brown.
Enquiries:
Colin Cruywagen
Cell: 082 377 9916
