“Power outages are imminent in future,” said the Makhado Municipality on Tuesday after struggling through Sunday night to restore the power supply to parts of Makhado (Louis Trichardt).

On Sunday, a massive power outage affected the greater part of town. By late Sunday afternoon, some parts of town had their power supply restored, while others stayed in the dark until early Monday morning.

But what caused the weekend’s power outage?

According to the municipality, a 22kV indoor circuit breaker panel in the Stubbs Street substation failed at about 11:30 on Sunday, due to insulation fatigue. The fault tripped out the industrial and central lines on two occasions, which then had to be restored.

“This fault in Stubbs Street caused extensive damage to the 22kV circuit breaker, as well as the entire metering and protection circuitry of the panel, and the whole 10MVA substation had to be taken out of commission. Another circuit breaker was installed on the 8^th and will be commissioned and put back in service by the 9^th, when the substation will be energised and loaded,” said the municipality. They further explained that the Stubbs Street substation is a firm 5 MVA. “At the moment, it runs near to full non-firm capacity of 10MVA. It is therefore fully loaded and one of the most important in-feed points to Extension 1, Extension 2, and the central business district (CBD). The 22kV switchgear failed many times over the years and has now been replaced. The 11kV switch gear is in fairly good condition.”

After a dark Sunday, nearly all residents had electricity supply by 07:00 on Monday when the electricity feed came from different substations, and by Tuesday the electricity supply to the whole town was expected to be normal.  A major challenge, however, is that the capacity of the transformers and the cables feeding power to the different feeders is inadequate and should be upgraded to accommodate the growth in development.

On learning that the Stubbs Street substation failure was responsible for the outage, the Zoutpansberger enquired about the condition of all the substations in town. The municipality explained that the town has seven secondary substations, of which two are known as outdoor substations and five as indoor substations. The danger lies with the five indoor ones.  “The five secondary indoor substations in town need urgent replacement of their switchgear as they came to the end of their effective lifespan long ago. These substations were installed in the early 1980s. The current status is that they are aged,” said the municipality and added that the spares, repairs and replacement of these substations were an absolute must.

“The budget is not making provision for any substation as the amount is just too high. Applications are currently being launched with financial institutions in order to obtain funding for these projects,” the municipality told the Zoutpansberger in April this year. At that stage, it was stated that a total collapse of the entire network was not likely, "due to the fact that we have seven intake points at different places ... What can happen is that very long delays in restoring power failures may occur, due to a lack of adequate resources to attend to urgent emergencies."

The dark side of the story is that power outages are now looming. "It may be due to the national Eskom generation capacity constraints, or locally, when a fault may occur anytime, anywhere," the municipality said.