Suspects who allegedly sabotaged a generator at Koeberg power station which has triggered months of off-and-on power outages in the Western Cape have been identified, the 702 radio station quoted Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin as saying on Tuesday.
During routine maintenance late last year a bolt was left in one of the turbines which caused one of the generators to trip.
The news of saboteurs was immediately greeted with a ”shocked” response from outgoing Cape Town Mayor Nomaindia Mfeketo, who said it was ”in the interests of the city, its residents and its economy that the matter be cleared up as soon as possible”.
Mfeketo, who on Monday acknowledged that she had been too silent on the recurrent outages in recent weeks, said: ”We need to be able to focus on our agenda of building Cape Town without the constant threat of unscheduled power
interruptions.”
702 reported that Erwin had said that the incident at Koeberg had been ”intensively” investigated.
Mfeketo added: ”We have had our suspicions and now I hope that this investigation will quickly get to the bottom of the matter.”
Meanwhile the city said it had updated its ”ongoing contingency plans to deal with the latest electricity blackouts” and had taken urgent steps to safeguard residents.
Cape Town was hit by power outages on Tuesday morning.
Key city departments were coordinating their daily actions with other roleplayers in a joint operations centre, a statement from the mayor’s office said.
The city also announced that it would be installing uninterrupted power supply devices to keep traffic lights working for more than six hours after a power outage — at 200 of the most critical of the 1 260 intersections. This would cost the city R8-million.
According to Eskom, the transmission lines between Beaufort-West and Worcester tripped earlier on Tuesday, interrupting the power supply to the Western Cape.
Koeberg’s Unit Two reactor was shut down as a precaution to avoid damage. It would only be re-started in phases once the supply network was stabilised.
For local government election day on Wednesday the city released a schedule of outages — dubbed load shedding — for the various suburbs of Cape Town. One set of suburbs — including Century City, Milnerton, Higgovale, Gardens — goes off for three and a half hours from 6am and again for three hours from 2pm.
In the second set of suburbs including Mowbray, the University of Cape Town, Kewtown, Marconi Beam, Royal Ascot, Woodstock and Sea Point, the power goes off from 9am to 12.30pm and again from 4.30pm to 7.30pm.
In the remaining suburbs including Gugulethu, Manenberg, Nyanga, KTC, Landsdown, Claremont, Rondebosch — where the ministerial estate is housed —
the power will go off from noon to 3pm and again from 7pm to 10.30pm.
Voting for local government councillors takes place from 7am to 7pm on Wednesday.
Meanwhile official opposition Democratic Alliance mayoral candidate Helen Zille said that Eskom had repeatedly singled out specific technical faults as the cause of each outage incident — and the city had pointed fingers at Eskom and tried to shirk its own part in the mess.
She said the bigger picture was that between Eskom and the ruling African National Congress council, Cape Town had not been provided with sufficient electricity and distribution capacity to meets its level of growth. She called on the mayor to be axed by the voters and for the Eskom CEO — who had been given fat bonuses and a huge salary — to be removed by Erwin.
Earlier Erwin said that the Western Cape was not suffering from a capacity problem ”but rather result in part from a series of events that were triggered by the absence of the second generator at Koeberg”.
He also said that a trip on a transmission line had resulted in the shutting down of the nuclear power station, Koeberg, in the Western Cape — and urgent repairs were being undertaken. – I-Net Bridge